Awards & Honors

Each year on the eve of the Portland Architecture Awards, the trio of jury members selecting the awards gather with an audience at the AIA's Center For Architecture to discuss their own work and, more importantly, what the awards submittals lead them to think about Portland's architecture and architects overall.

This year's Boston-based jury of Tim Love, Elizabeth Whittaker and Mariana Ibanez has between them some remarkable resumes. Each has taught or currently teaches architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Whtitaker's firm, Merge Architects, combines design and craft in an innovative, meaningful way. Ibanez's work explores new possibilities for integrating architecture and technology. Love's firm has a lengthy history with public buildings, housing and master planning.

The jurors, only one of whom (Love) had been to Portland before, began by noting "a lot of commonalities between the interesting work being done in the Boston metro area and Portland," as Tim Love put it. "One reason might be because of land values and the rising cost of real estate and those pressures. It’s forced our cultures to get smart about using inexpensive materials. The use of HardiePanel or metal panel, that family of stuff is similar. And the building types are similar; the single family small lot stuff that’s very much like neighborhoods in south Boston and Somerville: cottages on small lots. You’ve got the small developer stuff off like 12 to 30 units, and the big macho developer stuff. That whole food chain is familiar to us. It was like we were shopping for moves."

"I really appreciated the level of detail," Whittaker added. "It’s uncanny how you’re pulling that off out here. Some of these projects are so well crafted. I think it wasn’t necessarily a fancier or more expensive material. It’s as if the people putting them together care more, maybe more than I find in Boston with the crews we work with. I don’t know what the building culture in Portland is like. Maybe there’s something going on out here. Maybe there are less of them and they’re less of a dime a dozen."

Juror Tim Love (Utile Architecture & Planning)

"The Boston market is so overheated now it’s hard to get contractors and the quality is dropping off," Love agreed. "I think the difference is…for the most part the projects that we liked, there’s a little bit more sense on the architects’ side about what the capacity of the contractors are. Some firms in Boston I think over-reach what the crafts can deliver."

Love and Whittaker also identified a couple of quirks relating to how different parts of buildings are put together.

"Portland is very good at realizing that he ground floor is different from the upper floors," Love said. "You do good podiums here, and not always in the same way."

"Which is interesting, because there aren’t as many tall buildings," Whittaker added. "You don’t need to rely on the podium."

"I think the ground floor and upper floor uses are also about choreographing sequences," Love explained. "On the ground floor it can be tunnel-like with competing retail things. We had discussions about the quality of coming into the lobby and what the effect of surprise was when you went to the upper floor: that difference is undervalued, I think. Some very modest projects had a very interesting handle on that."

The jury then returned to the notion of how Portland architects handle materials and form, not just in a sense of craftsmanship but also "a smart economy of materials, where a lot of the projects have one or two," Whittaker explained. "Very simple, super pure forms."

As they talked, the jury showed what was supposed to be a random group of images from projects submitted, but the work of Waechter Architecture seemed to keep coming onscreen, and some of the jury's comments seemed, at least in my mind, to refer to Waechter's sense of material economy as an emblem for the greater Portland architecture community.

"If you can’t use luxurious materials to do your thing and you’re left with HardiePanel or metal panel, you need to really use that material more to clad a volume," Love said. "You can’t objectify it. It’s a wrapper. And then what you’re left with as you have fewer and fewer moves is to just subtract voids and proportions. It almost becomes like a version of stucco contemporary architecture in Vienna. But it’s not stucco. It’s HardiePanel or metal panel. That’s very interesting to us. You’re forced to think about composition with the basics. I think American architecture is more one of assembly. I think there’s an interesting theoretical 'aha.' Maybe we’re just trying too hard. Pick a nice gray HardiePanel and embrace the thing. That’s weird because it changes the strategies a little bit."

When the jury offered to take questions, I asked what some of their initial impressions of Portland had been.

"It’s a pretty great city, and probably a great city to be in as an architect," Love said. "The only downside is it may be more isolated as an economy than a city like Boston is. But I think the scale of the city has an influence on the scale of the work. I think that sense of appropriate scale, almost miniaturized. It’s almost like a four-fifths scale. I like four-fifth cities. Houston is like a six-fifths city. Everything seems all pumped up there."

Juror Mariana Ibanez (NPR)

Another member of the audience asked if the jurors had any advice for Portland architects. Whittaker seemed to want more formal daring.

"I think you’re doing so much so well, in terms of how you’re detailing, and the care shows in the finished product: the way it’s built. That’s what stands out the most," she said. "I think there is a formal sensibility that seems very specific to Portland, and I see a few projects that are breaking out of that. I’d like to come back in eight years and see even more ambitious geometries that are also bringing along this level of craft. It’s easy to do something that’s formally loud but not to do it well."

"I’d like to see some public architecture that isn’t schools," Love added. "I’d like to see an excellent civic building where people can argue about what’s coming to their neighborhood. Most of the excellent work is private, right? Maybe some advocacy can be done for that."

Love also offered some praise based on the local set of conditions. "Small firms in Portland have to be more entrepreneurial. In Boston they’re all connected with the universities."

But Whittaker confirmed that the world has taken notice of our city. "There is a buzz about Portland, and there has been for a while," she said. "And it’s about livability."

Ibanez added that a lot of her students at Harvard do thesis projects on Portland even though they’re not from here.

Ultimately the jury process is always an imperfect one. It makes sense for objectivity's sake for out-of-town professionals to act a jurors, but they almost always have to decide the winners based on photos instead of site visits, and in most cases they have no familiarity with the city at all. Yet these annual awards have shown a continuity across the years and across juries in terms of what they like: projects that blend craftsmanship and an eye for the little details with a reverence for local natural material and, increasingly, a little bit of formal daring.

Beebe Skidmore Architects and Works Progress Architecture (formerly Works Partnership Architecture) took home the top-level Honor Award on Thursday night at the annual Portland Architecture Awards, given out by the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Mentioned together, the names of two winning projects sound like guesses for a four-letter word puzzle beginning with 'S' on Wheel of Fortune: Swift and Slate. But instead of winning a Buick (as my college roommate once did on the show - winning word "judge"), these firms take home a certificate and the validation of being in the company of many superb past projects honored in the awards' history.

Swift, by Beebe Skidmore, is a renovation and transformation of a cluster of attached warehouses in Slabtown near NW 17th & Overton into a light-filled and wide open home for the Swift advertising agency. Both alumni of Portland's most acclaimed firm, Allied Works, Doug Skidmore and Heidi Beebe deserved this Honor Award in my mind.

The project retains much of the original concrete-block warehouse in a visible way even as it adds contemporary architecture. They retained the original sawtooth skylights, for example, and then used that triangular form as inspiration for a mezzanine addition. Inside there is a hive of activity, with light pouring in and a generous amount of space devoted to common areas. And there is a broader sense of surprise that happens there in terms of proportion. When the architects punched new window openings into the old concrete walls, for example, they placed them not symmetrically in the middle but according to where the concrete was strongest. As a result, it feels highly detailed yet a step ahead of expectation, somehow. The whole composition feels like a piece of music to me.

Slate (Works Progress Architecture)

Slate has, during its construction, maintained a relatively low profile given how its next-door neighbor, Yard (also being built more or less at the same time), has been so controversial and garnered so much press. The two buildings are not dissimilar in some ways, each with some pretty dark facades. Yet Slate is going to be seen as the more successful. It continues WPA's exceptional ability with facade patterning, with a series of white apertures contrasting the darker facade material.

And Slate contributes to what is now a really noteworthy portfolio of buildings in one extended area: the Central Eastside and lower Burnside. And while this is the first big award for Beebe Skidmore, WPA is a regular at the Portland Architecture Awards. I wouldn't be surprised if they're the most winning firm of the past decade; if not they've got to be in the top handful. And it's well deserved.

There were lots of other awards given out last night, many of them equally significant.

WPA's Framework (Brian Libby)

Works Progress Architecture also won the Craftsmanship Award, for its Framework project, also in this Lower Burnside area. It's part of a new generation of timber-framed buildings, along with work by firms like Lever Architecture and PATH Architecture, which I wrote about in a recent Portland Tribune column called "Framing The Future." And it's gorgeous, with a similar facade pattern language to Slate only smaller and perhaps a little more transparent.

After the Honor Award, the sort of silver medal of the night is the Merit Award, which went to five projects. Two Merit Awards were designated for small projects, and both of those were won by Waechter Architecture: Oakley House (which I wrote about last year for Dwell magazine) and Pavilion House. The aforementioned Framework by WPA also won a Merit Award, as did Holst Architecture for the Open School East and Hacker for the Lakeside at Black Butte Ranch.

Oakley House (Waechter Architecture)

The next award tier is the Citation Award, which went to six projects. Waechter Architecture won for the Red House, a renovation of an existing early 20th century farmhouse in Southeast Portland; I wrote about it last year for Oregon Home magazine and was impressed by how Ben Waechter was able to apply his gift for simplifying the feel of its space by economizing its materials and detailing to an old house instead of a ground-up building. As if these awards weren't enough, Waechter also won for the Sawtooth multifamily housing project. I could be mistaken, but I think everything the firm entered won an award. Oh, and Waechter took home one of the two Honor Awards last year, in addition to a few in the past. Quite a roll.

Another of my favorite firms to emerge in recent years, Lever Architecture, won a Citation for its Albina Yard project, which is also exceptionally innovative for its wood construction. I visited the building a few weeks ago and came away very impressed, not just with the crispness of the composition but also its warmth. Even the wood stairway is beautiful.

Stairway at Albina Yard (Brian Libby)

Hacker, which has done excellent work for decades now, be it under the influential Thomas Hacker or today with a new generation at the helm, also won a Citation for its attractive Basecamp Townhouse in Bend, which shares a developer with the Honor Award-winning Swift: Project. Bora also won a Citation Award for the Cosmopolitan Condominiums, which I blogged about earlier this summer and generally quite like too.

The final Citation Award went to another frequent award-winning firm, Holst Architecture, for its Karuna at One North. Visiting this building extensively last year for a New York Times article, I came away hugely impressed, so much so that I'm a bit surprised to see Karuna not win an Honor Award. It could hardly be more energy efficient, as a commercial building with much of the same approaches as the earlier Holst-designed Karuna House outside Newberg that a couple years ago became the first in the world to earn LEED, Passive House and the Swiss Minergie rating. What's more, I think this Karuna building that received a Citation Award is particularly beautiful with its curvy facade openings.

Karuna at One North (Brian Libby)

Despite not getting the gold medal from this year's three-person jury panel, all Boston-based, Karuna at One North did win one of the top non-juried prizes, the Mayor's Award, selected for a final time this year by Mayor Charlie Hales. Also winning a Mayor's Award were the Kerns Micro House by Fieldwork Design and Architecture, Slate by WPA, and Park Avenue West by TVA Architects. The mayor reserved two awards for small projects and two for large urban projects, and between the tiny Kerns project and the tall Park Avenue West tower downtown, he certainly covered the size spectrum.

Another special prize, the 2030 Award for innovative sustainable design, went to ZGF Architects for the Rocky Mountain Institute. ZGF in recent years has managed to combine leading-edge green strategies and a deep sense of how to make elegant civic buildings, reflected its listing this year atop the Architect 50 list as the nation's top firm.

Two other projects won the Significant Design Contribution Award, which is nominated by the architect. General contractor Hoffman Construction won for TVA's Park Avenue West project, and Reworks was honored as owner/contractor for Lever Architecture's Albina Yard.

At the annual Jury Critique on Wednesday night, the eve of the awards, this year's Boston-based jurors (Elizabeth Whitaker of Merge Architects, Tim Love of Utile and Mariana Ibanez of Ibanez Kim) were very complimentary of Portland architecture in general, especially the level of craft and elegant simplicity that seemed to span projects.

Congratulations to all the winning firms, as well as to the nominees who did good work but for whatever reason didn't make the awards list.

Each year Architect magazine, the official publication of the American Institute of Architects, publishes a list of the top 50 firms in the United States. And while Portland is only the 20th-largest metropolitan area in the United States, the magazine this month named Portland firm ZGF Architects as tops nationally.

What does the list mean, and how is it calculated? It seems to be a combination of business and financial success mixed with achievement in design and sustainability. The magazine cited ZGF's 17 percent increase in net revenue in 2015, and its "relentless push for higher building performance," with managing partner Ted Hyman telling interviewer Amanda Hurley, “They feed off of each other. If we can show [clients] we’re bringing value in terms of design, it affects the bottom line. It takes care of itself.” Hurley also notes that ZGF recently brought in a chief financial officer who previously worked for two law firms and a new “chief people officer” to spearhead talent development.

At the same time, a number of major ZGF projects have come to a head, either recently completed or about to be, such as a major expansion of the Nike campus in Beaverton, a new cancer center for the University of Arizona, the J. Craig Venter Institute for genomics research in La Jolla, California outside San Diego, and offices for the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado, not to mention landmarks of recent years like the Federal Center South project in Seattle. And the firm has a long history, dating to 1942, with a host of important Portland buildings and structures.

"The firm practices with imagination and finesse," wrote Architizer's Eric Baldwin in a recent tribute.

When I sat down recently with two ZGF partners, Kathy Berg and Jan Willemse, they offered a mix of pride in the achievement with an acknowledgement that lists can be a bit superficial or subject to an infinite number of different calculations.

"After it was announced someone at the firm said to me, ‘What does this mean? What did we do?’ I said, ‘It’s pretty opaque,’" Willemse recalls. "You get the survey and fill it out and you give them this information, and list projects that have been completed. But it’s not entirely clear the weighting of the questions and answers and categories: business, sustainability and design. It’s some average of those. I’m not sure which counts for more or less. I do know we’ve been in the past ranked in the top 10 a few times. We’re used to being recognized, even when from year to year the questions shift. Were we surprised? Yeah. You never know."

"I think it puts us in good stead," Berg says. "There are a lot of other good firms on the list. When I looked at the questions, I was encouraged that what we’re spending a lot of time looking at, Architect was too. We’re talking about relevant topics for our firm and our employees. That to me is a good sign."

How much of the ranking is about design? "Architect is AIA sponsored. It’s probably a more balanced evaluation of things than you’d get out of more of an aesthetically driven magazine that’s looking for visual aspects for buildings, and questions about business aren’t a part of the equation," Willemse says. "This is a balanced look across these levels: with people, with clients, with business numbers. Aesthetics, beauty and meaning will always drive our business. They’re prerequisites. You have to focus on those or you won’t survive. But can you take care of your people? Can you watch the bottom line, while serving your clients and community well?"

Berg says what she found the most exciting was "being recognized for design and sustainability. I think the industry is moving away from the idea that they are mutually exclusive. Sustainable design can create incredibly beautiful solutions. I think people can really see that."

"Some sustainable projects are a bit awkward," Willemse added somewhat sheepishly. We agreed on some major, high-profile green projects of recent years in both Seattle and Portland, some completed and some unbuilt, that were categorically ugly despite meeting rigid sustainability strictures like the Living Building Challenge. "You don’t want to bash them. But as a profession we do want to believe you can create beautiful things that are sustainable."

I've long felt that ZGF is that rare firm that seems to transcend the industry's traditional distinction between "service firm" (able to win big commissions based on having done other big commissions in the past) and "design firm" (noted for its quality creations and awards but without much practical big-job experience). Berg and Willemse believe that stems from the firm's culture, and the influence of longtime partners like Robert Frasca (the 'F' in ZGF). "There’s this ethos that a project can always be better," Berg says.

12 | West (Brian Libby)

Berg also cited the firm's success with trying new project types. "There isn’t a sense here that we just do health care or campus buildings or corporate offices. When we did the Portland International Airport expansion, it was one of the first airports we’d done," she explains. "When we did Doernbecher, it was one of our first children’s hospitals. We get some of the best projects in our portfolio doing that type for the first time or working for a new client for the first time. We spend a lot of time making sure the client wants to go on a fantastic journey with us."

"It’s contextual as opposed to formulaic, and all of that really originated with Frasca," Willemse adds. "It’s kind of quintessentially Portland in that you make do with what you’ve got. This was never a heavy industry driven place or an economic center. I think that allowed the firm to continually try different kinds of projects. The Vollum Institute was our first of that type. Frasca designed what’s called the interaction stair: the idea that you’d create casual collisions if you actually took some speace and said peole are going to run into each other here, and foster new ideas. You now see that everwhere. It’s the principles of how human beings utilize their space moving through their day when they have choice to be connected. Those principles drive the work, not necessarily an aesthetic."

"It’s also about the quality of the detailing, and just the craft of making," Willemse adds. "That goes to stewardship of resources, whether it’s the physical or the client’s money. Frasca always loved doing institutional work, so our muscle memory became about createing 50 or 100-year-old buildings. That’s not the same mentality you get from, say, developer-driven work. It creates a quality of intention." ZGF has gone on to do a lot of developer-driven work, of course, like the 12 West building in which the company's headquarters is situated; it was developed by the city's most prominent developer, Gerding Edlen. But Gerding Edlen also has a commitment to sustainability that is seemingly as strong as its need to make a profit.

Berg and Willemse also stress the everyday firm culture and its attention to detail. "That’s what I joined the firm for: the attention to detail," Willemse says. "My bosses like Frasca used to say, 'We want it to pass the 500-foot test and the five-foot test."

"I remember coming to the firm, and ZGF was the first I'd worked at that said, 'We don’t copy details. You re-draw it, and understand how it applies to this project, and you make it better," Berg recalls. "We don’t copy for the sake of efficiency. We build on it and make it better. You won’t see the same details on project. Brooks [Gunsul, the 'G' in ZGF] was very adamant that you don’t copy and paste."

The two partners also talked about how the look of ZGF's buildings has evolved with changing times and material technologies. Works of the Reagan-Bush era like the KOIN tower, the Justice Center and the Oregon Convention Center, all with more masonry on the exterior than glass, look very different from the firm's more glassy 21st century projects. Particularly since the arrival of projects like the Eliot condos in the West End, or the aforementioned 12 West, one can associate ZGF in this Eugene Sandoval era (to name a key ZGF partner and leader of recent years) with glass as much as any material.

"As we’ve brought in new blood to the firm, things are going to evolve naturally," Willemse says. "In the ‘80s, where postmodern was on its last legs but there were residual elements you see in buildings like the KOIN center, they were of their time and place. But I don’t think there’s a panelize brick manufacturer left in the Northwest today."

"And some of what we do with glazing now," Berg adds, "the technology didn’t exist in the ‘80s: the giant pieces of glass we can get from China and the unitized curtain walls."

"Has ZGF evolved into just better design? I think in many respects that goal of a certain quality of timelessness has remained, as has a commitment to a quality of craft," Willemse says. "But it has evolved over time with the technology available and the staff? Is there a difference now? Sure."

By no means is every ZGF building a masterpiece. The Randall Children's Hospital is, while great functionally, not exactly a looker. And take the NV, a new 26-story condo in the Pearl District by the firm's Seattle office, which at least to my eyes looks both banal and, thanks to some loud patterning on one corner of the facade, quite unattractive and even trite. I'd take the much-maligned Yard tower over this building. But for every NV there are a host of very fine and timeless ZGF buildings, not just from recent years but over the decades.

In a way, I think the KOIN Center is indicative of ZGF's enduring quality as much as its impressive and highly sustainable green projects. There is so much postmodern and neo-historic architecture of the 1980s that hasn't aged well at all. But KOIN has a timeless quality that transcends 1980s style; it's almost like a brick-clad Chrysler Building in how it elegantly tapers towards the top.

Portland International Airport canopy (Travel Portland)

When I think of ZGF over the years, I also think one of their best works is not a building per se: the canopy at Portland International Airport. ZGF's fingerprint is all over that airport, from expanded concourses to the innovative Port of Portland headquarters there next to the parking garages to even the MAX train leading there (the firm designed many of its stations). But being under that glass canopy is always a thrilling moment. Whenever I'm about to fly out or I'm there picking someone up, I almost always stop and marvel at the sensation of being underneath a glass roof bigger than a couple of football fields. It's functional — the roof is there to keep the rain off us without compromising the light — and yet it brings a sense of wonder.

What does the future hold in Portland for the firm?

Despite its tremendous success both business-wise and architecturally, the firm's true roots lie in civic and institutional projects, like the Oregon Convention Center and Doernbecher Children's Hospital. But Portland lacks the public and private wealth of other major cities that is often necessary to make such works happen regularly. Hence ZGF's strong presence outside the city with offices in several cities. But there is more to be done here of that scale. I'll bet ZGF would have done a better-looking and more Portland-appropriate headquarters hotel by the Convention Center than Metro is about to get. OHSU is also expanding steadily onto its South Waterfront campus, which seems tailor made for the firm. And as a longtime proponent of Veterans Memorial Coliseum restoration, I'd be happier seeing ZGF on the job than a firm that would mistakenly put too much of its own fingerprint on Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's masterful original 1960 design.

And with one of the biggest waves of new construction the city has seen in a century, I expect to see a host of new ZGF office buildings and condos appear in the ensuing years as well. Chances are when they come, they won't necessarily get as much attention as bolder competing works by other firms, but these buildings will endure and exhibit a sense of quality craftsmanship, sustainable performance and restrained handsomness that will mean architecture critics and passers-by of 2076 will appreciate them as much of those of us in 2016.

The two projects to take home the top-level Honor Award at this year's Portland Architecture Awards from the local American Institute of Architects chapter could not be more disparate in scale. One, Waechter Architecture's Garden House is a small accessory dwelling unit in the backyard of a larger home. The other, Allied Works' Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Center for Art & Design at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, re-imagines a full-block sized early 20th Century federal building. But the design acumen is first rate in both of these projects, by Allied Works and Waechter Architecture, in the eyes of the jury.

The Garden House is noteworthy for its cantilevered second floor, which adds square footage to a small floor plate while adding a striking sculptural quality. PNCA, while it may lack the razor-sharp precision of some past Allied Projects, is a breathtaking transformation of a formerly dark, oppressive space into a light-filled work centered around a new atrium.

Both of these firms, as well as many of this year's other award winners, are no stranger to the architectural trophy case. Although last year's jury declined to hand out any Honor Awards, Allied Works took the prize in 2013 with its Sokol Blosser Winery tasting room near Dundee, and in 2012 for Denver's Clyfford Still Museum, as well as the 2008 Honor Award for Booker T. Washington High School in Dallas. Weachter won an Honor Award in 2011 for the J-Tea teahouse in Eugene, as well as top honors in this year's AIA Northwest & Pacific Region for the Pavilion House.

Waechter Architecture's Garden House (photo by Sally Schoolmaster)

The next tier of honors, known as the Merit Award, went to four projects, all by firms that are regulars in the AIA Portland Architecture Awards winners' circle: 3330 Division Street, a mixed-use apartment building on burgeoning SE Division Street by Hacker; Tree House, an octagonal residential building by Lever Architecture at Oregon Health & Science University's Marquam Hill campus; Fire Station 76 in Gresham by Hennebery Eddy Architects, and (in the Unbuilt category) a Memorial Coliseum renovation plan by Skylab Architecture. The Hacker project was also singled out as a 2030 Award winner for its sustainable credentials.

ZGF Architects, which won the Honor Award in 2013 for its Hatfield-Dowlin Complex at the University of Oregon, in 2011 for the Legacy Emmanuel Medical Center Central Utility Plant and in 2010 for its Jaqua Center (also at UO), won a Citation Award this year for its Stanford University Central Energy Facility. Citation Awards, the AIA's third-tier prize, also went to Ankeny 2/3, a residential project in Southeast Portland by Colab Architecture + Urban Design, and the Sanford Lab Homestake Visitor Center in South Dakota by Dangermond Keane Architecture.

This year's Small Project Award went to two projects: the Vomo Island Spa at Vomo Island Resort in Fiji by Architecture Building Culture and the Artisan's Cup project (a Portland Art Museum exhibit of bonsai plants) by Skylab Architecture. ABC firm previously won an Unbuilt Citation Award in 2011 for its Lubavitch Centre in Vancouver, British Columbia, and a Citation Award in 2012 for the Stubbs Residence. Skylab has won several AIA awards, including an Honor Award in 2012 for the Nike Camp Victory pop-up, and an Honor Award in 2008 for 12 + Alder, a mixed-use project downtown.

ABC's Vomo Island Spa (image courtesy AIA)

Skylab Architecture's Artisan's Cup (image courtesy AIA)

The Jury Award and the Mayor's Design Award rounded out the night's prizes. The Jury Award, previously known as the People's Choice Award, went to the Pickathon Tree-Line Stage, a temporary work created by a team from Portland State University's School of Architecture. The Mayor's Design Award went to two projects: Allied Works' Schnitzer Center at PNCA, and the Stadium Fred Meyer by Mackenzie. An Honorable Mention for the Mayor's Award also went to Colab for the aforementioned Ankeny 2/3.

PSU's Tree-Line Stage (image courtesy AIA)

Mackenzie's Stadium Fred Meyer (image courtesy AIA)

Overall the awards seem to confirm that there is a small group of firms that win awards nearly every year they enter, such this year's Honor Award winners Allied Works and Waechter Architecture as well as venerable names like Holst Architecture, Works Partnership Architecture (both frequent winners in years past), Skylab, Hacker, Henneberry Eddy, Lever Architecture, and ZGF. But there are always firms like Architecture Building Culture and Colab quietly racking up honors, and firms like Mackenzie or Dangermond Keane infusing the city and beyond with new designs.

Although the recurrence of these firms attests to their resonance with a variety of juries, who each year come from out of town to evaluate these projects, the awards are, it must be said, a snapshot look at the local design seen by a trio of jurors without much of a deeper sense of Portland and the firms at work. (This year's jury included Kevin Daly of Kevin Daly Architects in Los Angeles, Betsy Williamson of Williamson Chong in Toronto and Sierra Bainbridge of MASS Design Group in Boston.) That's largely a good thing, for it frees up the jury to evaluate the architecture without prejudice. Yet it's also asking these jurors, however talented they may be, to pick winners in just a few short hours, usually doing so based solely on photographs rather than going to each project (which would be prohibitively time-consuming).

It's not to say the jury failed here. I might have chosen PNCA and the Garden House as the Honor Award winners too. But awards, as we all know, are an imperfect endeavor and often fail in the long run to be the best measure of quality. For architectural quality is ultimately the opposite of a split-second decision, instead a reflection of design and construction that endure across eras and stylistic periods.

So if you're an architect reading this who didn't win, keep in mind the Academy Award for Best Picture. It has actually gone to the not-best picture (How Green Was My Valley in 1941, Oliver! in 1968, Rocky in 1976, Dances With Wolves in 1990, Forrest Gump in 1994) far more often than it has gone to the best one of any particular year (Citizen Kane, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and Pulp Fiction in those same years). But we all come to know what the best movies are.

Earlier this month, the American Institute of Architects' Northwest & Pacific Region handed out its annual design awards, devoted to projects from a cluster of states including Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana and Hawaii. And this year, Portland firms cleaned up, with three different firms taking home awards: Waechter Architecture, Works Partnership Architecture, and Hacker (recently renamed from THA Architecture). In the latter case, Hacker won two awards, including the top one, the Honor Award.

As part of our occasional Portfolio series, featuring images from projects in and out of town by local firms, here are images of the four winning projects by these three firms.

First up is Waechter's Pavilion House, winner of a Citation Award (third place) from the AIA. The firm was tasked with the challenge of designing a “glass house” with privacy. The solution was to use a pavilion-like form where the four supporting legs of the building are strategically placed to block unwanted views and provide privacy. These four rectangular legs support the second story and have dual functionality as they also contain the stairs, kitchen, half bath and storage on the ground level. Between these legs, the open floor plan expands to outdoor living through floor to ceiling glass and doors. The polished concrete floor is cast on grade, creating a seamless transition to the surrounding yard.

The project replaces Jarra’s Ethiopian Restaurant and the Langano Lounge, which closed in May. The restaurant’s owners, Petros Jarra and Ainalem Sultessa, retained ownership of the development.

Langano Apartments (photographs by Joshua Jay Elliott)

The first of Hacker's two award winners is a new home for the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Central Oregon, located on the west side of Bend. Winner of the Honor Award from the AIA (first place), the project includes a 250-seat sanctuary with minister and choir platform, seven meeting/classroom spaces, a catering kitchen, an administrative office suite, and support spaces. The building will also serve the community as an event and performance space, a preschool, and will host yoga classes, art exhibits, and other community meetings.

The project is designed to embrace the high desert landscape, while also serving as a model of sustainability within the often harsh Central Oregon climate – embodying the Unitarian Universalist principle of “respect for the interdependent web of all existence.”

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship (photos by Lara Swimmer)

Discovery Hall at the University of Washington, which won Hacker a Merit Award, serves as an academic hub for science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs and houses classrooms and laboratories for chemistry, life science, physics, electrical engineering, software development and geographic information system.

The 74,600-square-foot building, also photographed by Lara Swimmer, is oriented east-west for optimal solar control with the use of daylight, sunshades and light controls. Operable windows in the classrooms and offices increase occupants’ control. Chilled beams, displacement ventilation, heat recovery, and solar hot water will further decrease energy use.

In the realm of sustainable American architecture, there is no greater honor than being named to the annual Top 10 Green Projects list, selected by the American Institute of Architects' Committee on the Environment. It's something only a few Portland buildings or Portland architects' works have achieved, and most of them have come in the past few years.

Two projects were named to last year's list, for example: Holst Architecture's Bud Clark Commons and the Edith Green Wendell Wyatt Federal Building by Cutler Anderson (of Bainbridge Island, Washington) and SERA Architects. In 2012 the Mercy Corps headquarters by THA Architecture made the list, as did two out-of-town projects by local firms: Portland Community College's Newberg outpost by Hennebery Eddy Architects and the Hood River Middle School Music & Sciences building by Opsis Architecture. But before that, it was fairly rare to find something from the Rose City on the list, even though Portland has seen itself as a leader in sustainable design for over a decade.

This year, the Collaborative Life Sciences Building by Los Angeles firm CO Architects and Portland's SERA Architects has been named to the list. It's a validation for this latest addition to Oregon Health & Sciences University's Schnitzer Campus in South Waterfront (a collaboration with Portland State University and Oregon State University). The 650,000 square foot building, completed last year for about $295 million, had already earned Platinum LEED status for features such as green roofs, storm water collection for non-potable water, and energy-efficient lighting and climate control, making it about 45 percent more efficient than a comparably sized building designed to code.

The building is comprised of the 12-story Skourtes Tower on the north and a five-story south wing, which are connected by an atrium in the middle, along with lecture halls on the east and west sides. It includes lecture halls, classrooms labs, specialty research centers, OHSU School of Dentistry facilities, and offices for health professionals and educators from multiple institutions.

I'm not necessarily head over heels about how the CLSB looks from the outside, perhaps a bit like a banal office tower fused with oblong additions in three directions. But there was a lot of program to fit inside this building. And being inside the multi-story atrium, as a stream of students and faculty move about like some kind of academic/medical core sample, it still is a genuinely lovely space to behold. Given how it seems to work so well for its occupants, coupled with the building's environmental credentials, one has to call the CLSB a rousing success.

Recently I exchanged questions and answers with CO Architects principal Jonathan Kanda about being named to the COTE Top 10 list and what he takes away from the experience.

Portland Architecture: How did you react upon hearing the news that the CLSB was named to the COTE Top 10 list? Was it a surprise?

Kanda: Our team thought we had a very interesting sustainability story with the CLSB given the project’s size, programmatic complexity, and aggressive sustainability targets. But each year the bar gets raised on COTE submissions, so it’s always gratifying to win. The team is very pleased to be recognized!

Any building, green or otherwise, is the sum of many different components and design aspects, but what do you think sold the COTE committee on the decision to put the CLSB on the list?

All projects that receive COTE awards inherently perform high with regard to energy efficiency and the use/preservation of material resources. I believe the CLSB is one of the largest projects in the country to achieve LEED Platinum, but I’d like to think a few factors helped to distinguish the CLSB: The site has been remediated and resurrected from its industrial past, and it is situated at a multi-transit crossroads. In consideration of the environmental cost of getting to and from our buildings, the CLSB site gives its users and visitors every possible option to minimize their carbon footprint. It is a perfect marriage with the Portland urban ethos. But frankly, the core decision by the three university-owners to merge resources and build a shared, collaborative facility really elevated the sustainability narrative. Sharing, maximizing the utilization of space, and creating an adaptable, flexible building that can accommodate ever-changing curricular and pedagogical trends was the greenest decision of all. We’re starting to see more of these partnerships take hold.

What kind of feedback have you received so far from users of the building and other stakeholders?

We are pleased that the feedback from the users and stakeholders has been overwhelmingly positive. A lot of the sustainability achievements go unnoticed or are simply woven into the daily experience. Users notice the public spaces, areas to gather, socialize, and build human relationships…and the light and views! Some of the views are truly extraordinary.

Have you received any data yet regarding how the building is performing, in terms of energy or otherwise?

The building has been operational for just under a year, so the analysis is still a work in progress. But so far, the building performance appears to be on track. From an energy standpoint, it is estimated to perform 45% more efficient than a typical building code facility.

Is there anything from this project that might constitute a lesson learned, or an advance that you might be able to apply to other projects?

As mentioned earlier, we are engaged in several projects that are supporting multi-institutional and interdisciplinary partnerships that leverage collaboration and maximize the sharing of human and physical resources. It’s like another form of passive sustainable design.

Could you talk a little about the partnership that CO and SERA had, and the complimentary skills the two firms had that helped the project become successful?

A project of this size, complexity, and ambition required the blended skills and expertise of two firms, and a partnership like none that I’ve experienced before. SERA had the native understanding of everything Portland: mindset, environment, design review and permitting process, codes, relationships with the AEC community, etc. Plus deep experience in building highly sustainable buildings in the Pacific Northwest. CO brought national programming and design expertise to this hybrid building type. We co-located in SERA’s office for several months, along with consultants, contractors, and owners.

This is a continuation of my discussion with SRG Partnership founding partner Jon Schleuning, FAIA, who recently received the received the 2014 Medal of Honor from the American Institute of Architects' Northwest & Pacific Region. From historic preservation to master planning, architecture to professional leadership, Schleuning has over the past four decades helped make Portland what it is today, and has influenced generations of designers.

Portland Architecture: How has the profession changed over time for you?

Schleuning: The profession is moving in two separate directions. The delivery side is building-focused and moving towards wanting everybody to be together, often in a common physical location. The idea is to get everybody together so we can collectively make more efficient and better decisions. On the design side, we’re at the other extreme, focused on cloud-computing, complex BIM modeling, and interactive video conferencing. The design-based teams want to be more far-reaching and as a result, are more fragmented. In addition, we’re not limited to thinking about individual buildings but larger scale eco-districts and clusters or families of buildings. Todays design challenges emphasize resource conservation and sharing, optimization of current facilities, and strategic densification. Share the energy. Consolidate the water. Thinking in bigger chunks. It’s not only, ‘Here’s the building and we’re on budget and time, but have we used the the resources on hand in an optimal manner? Are we left with 200,000 square feet of vacant space that no one knows what to do with?’ A design team has the responsibility to do more than just design a building, but to seek broader solutions: ‘ why not remodel here and add a new addition her instead. It may be smarter than just a stand-alone new building here.’

SRG previously worked on the restoration of the Washington State Capitol, and now you’re working on a $200 million plan to restore the Oregon state capitol building. Could you talk about that particular opportunity and challenge? How has it made you appreciate the original architecture?

In the early 1970s our office did the planning studies for the new wings on the south side of the State Capitol Building which ZGF designed and implemented in the mid-70’s. Thirty years later, SRG was selected to do a new master plan focused on seismic upgrades and much-needed renovations; and in 2014, our team was chosen to implement many of those recommendations. I have been deeply involved in much of that work; and hopefully the legislature will be supportive. The building needs it.

What is interesting is a major public building, the product of a national design competition, completed in 1938 at the height of the Depression. This followed a fire that had destroyed the previous, very classical and ornate facility. And here, the State of Oregon selects a building design so distinctly modernist and different than anything else. Initially I looked at it and said, ‘Well, it’s kind of a solid, utilitarian piece, neither dramatically handsome nor homely, just matter of fact.’ But the more I work with it, the more pride and respect I have for that building.

Oregon State Capitol (image courtesy History.com)

The Capitol was completed at the same time Belluschi was doing the [Portland] Art Museum. You see the similarities in terms of the simplicity of the massing, the clarity of the building elements and proportions, and the readability of its purpose and function. . There is a presence and a cadence to it that is really remarkable. There is minimal detail. There’s no base. It’s a modernist building at a pivotal time in architectural history, moving from classicism into modernism. Here is a building so appropriate for the citizens of Oregon. It wasn’t ostentatious. It was utilitarian. It was handsome. It has a presence to it. It was an East Coast architect that captured the persona of the state. Today, 75 years later, it’s probably even closer to the state’s persona than the Depression-ravaged citizenry of the ‘30s, embodying the heritage of a sustainable environments, the bottle bill, public beaches and rivers and more. Everything about Oregon is embodied in the pioneer statue on top. Not some heroic politician on a horse, just an average guy looking for something better. It’s inspiring.

What does it need to be relevant today and tomorrow as a working building?

You realize the need to protect the building from seismic damage and worn-out infrastructure; but also the need to enhance the working environment. Bring in more natural light, re-capture the natural ventilation. When it was completed in 1938, it was the most sustainable state capitol in the Union. It is a classic sustainable building and we’re preserving that. One of the goals of the 2009 Master Plan was to make it the most sustainable capitol in the country once again.

We’re addressing the seismic issue through base isolation technology [under-floor seismic protection] and we decided to lower the floor a few feet at the same to make the space usable for additional hearing rooms and departmental space. We can make this building a habitable and efficient governmental center without damaging its historic character. The public can enjoy the building and the people using it can be more efficient and get more done.

What keeps you going in the profession?

I have a strength in design that can envision new combinations of ideas and to convince people that these ideas are beneficial to the client and the public. It’s that transition from an abstract ideas into sketches into a building that’s often missing right now, especially when someone says, ‘I want 200,000 square feet for a certain amount of dollars.’ The process needs to be more flexible and nebulous. I have the privilege to work with talented people where everybody contributes. Everybody has good ideas. It isn’t hierarchical. I’m more of an orchestra leader, saying, ‘Let’s explore this point,’ or, ‘Have you thought about this?’ It’s lucky that SRG has always been blessed with diversity with people of different talents, interests and types; but also the diversity of ideas in saying, ‘Let’s try this or let’s explore this.’ When a majority of your clients are owner-users, you also have the obligation to be certain that what you do for then really works; that it’s not a whim or a fad. If you try something new, you’d better test it first.

What energizes me are the people around me. Architecture is the greatest profession in the people it attracts -- people drawn to the profession not for flashy cars or corner offices. They’re attracted to architecture because it’s about people contributing something lasting, not just here today and gone tomorrow. It’s the idea of transforming ideas and people’s expectations into something that’s special and tangible.

What’s a connecting thread amongst SRG’s clients?

They fit a common pattern – mostly people and institutions interested in contributing to the betterment of daily lives. A recent project is the Veterinary and Biomedical Research Building at Washington State University. It is a very sustainable kind of building and received national Lab-of-the Year recognition; but it is really trying to accomplish other things, many of which are relatively subtle. For example, the person working in the lab is the same person who uses the rest of the building. There’s not the differentiation of the lab portion and a corporate portion. We brought natural light into all the spaces. Everybody shares the light, the views, the common spaces, the same materials. Everybody is treated equally.

It seems like part of what you’re designing is social as well as physical.

When you have an open environment like our office, people become less territorial. It isn’t about having private offices, but having clusters of people around you. These conditions create collaboration and connectivity -- to nature, to natural light and views, to me, and to your neighbor. In the research, healthcare, and education fields where we do considerable work, the basic premise is sharing. So the question is, ‘Can we create environments for better collaboration and sharing?’ It’s not about objects or things but the more intangible elements. Finding places where you can have a public persona and a little bit of privacy. People are not just extraverts or an introverts but a little of both. Translating that to architecture is what is meaningful. It doesn’t have to be a church or a cathedral to have a spirit of place that says, this feels comfortable and I like being here. Once that’s true, then you’re willing to share things and together, you can achieve more than you ever could on our own. That’s the power of collaboration and working as a team.

Last fall, SRG Partnership co-founder Jon Schleuning received the 2014 Medal of Honor from the American Institute of Architects' Northwest & Pacific Region, awarded to architects who have demonstrated excellence in design, architectural education, or service to the profession while promoting public understanding of architects and architecture.

Founded in 1972, SRG Partnership has distinguished itself over the decades with experience in both historic preservation and in new construction, with an emphasis on sustainability and research. SRG's projects usually aren't flashy, but they possess a timelessness and rigor that reflects the wisdom of Schleuning and a team including principals like Kent Duffy and Dennis Cusack.

SRG's first project was the master plan for Johns Landing (in conjunction with John Storrs), which launched SRG’s reputation for planning and urban design. It was soon followed by the Lower Willamette Management Plan for the Port of Portland—the first successful strategic policy plan approved by local, state and national agencies for 16 miles of river use and shoreline development. The firm has overseen renovations to both the Washington and Oregon state capitol buildings, created high-tech facilities for like Intel and Fujitsu, popular public facilities like the Oregon Coast Aquarium and Mount St. Helens Visitors Center, and leading-edge green buildings like the Lillis Business Complex at the University of Oregon, Bellevue City Hall, Shriners Hospital in Honolulu, and numerous works for the University of California system.

In the early 1980s, SRG also served as architect of record in partnership with lead architect Arthur Erickson as one of the three finalists for the Portland Building commission. SRG's work is perhaps the opposite of the Michael Graves-designed building that was ultimately constructed, but as I saw at a recent dinner for Graves when the architect was in town last year for a public talk with Randy Gragg, Schleuning could not have been more gracious towards his more famous colleague.

Schleuning also has a long record civic involvement, including his presidency of the City Club of Portland and numerous review boards for Pioneer Square, Pioneer Place, and the Portland Performing Arts Center.

Recently I met with Schleuning to talk about his career and his passion for architecture.

Portland Architecture: After growing up in Portland, you originally studied at Yale University under famous names like Josef Albers and Vincent Scully, and got to meet Eero Saarinen. Yet you ultimately transferred to the University of California at Berkeley. What attracted you there?

Schleuning: I went through architecture school in that brief period of time where behavioral science suddenly was taking off. Yale’s program was in transition and UC Berkeley had just developed the College of Environmental Design. We were looking at prisons and all kinds of spaces that shaped people’s lives in a constructive way. I was just passionate about it.

What are your memories of working on the Portland Building competition?

It was an interesting time. I don’t see it as a high point or pivotal moment in my career. The Portland Building is probably midway from where I started and where I am today. It came at the end of a period of very intense public involvement that I felt was fundamental to what architecture was about -- cities and people and streets. It was also at a time when we had a lot of urban renewal work, the Portland Development Commission was really powerful, and there was a lot of federal money. So our firm was doing urban design studies for Morrison Street and Pioneer Courthouse Square and things like that. There was an intense interest in the public sector and the public domain. Portland, with its small blocks, has 33 percent of the land in public ownership; so you’re dealing with small chunks of real estate. At the time when other cities were building blockbuster, mega-buildings, Portland was still locked in. And it was a blessing.

When we approached the Portland Building, here was a chance for a public building that had some legitimacy to it. We were excited and delighted to be a part of one of the teams. Erickson had been doing some lovely work and had just finished the anthropology museum at UBC. He was a wonderful man, but we just didn’t have enough of his attention. I don’t think any of the three finalists’ projects were really successful. BOORA had an interesting one with Mitchell Giurgola. It was introverted with a big interior space. In our design, Arthur had the big strand that cut through the middle. It was a great idea that we didn’t really incorporate in any convincing matter, but it was a great idea. There were view corridors through the building. Buildings weren’t barricades, and especially public ones. Buildings were meant to have a porosity to them, especially on the lower levels. The Portland Building doesn’t accomplish that. I don’t think the Erickson building did it well. But to end up with a building that was really more pivotal stylistically rather than architecturally, that was [disappointing].

Part of it was the way the competition was set up. Which gets back to where we are today, in that often there’s a predetermination of what needs to be done without a careful analysis by the right people—not that it has to be only by architects. But architects and urban planners ought to be involved in figuring out what should be done. My mantra is not, ‘What can be done?’ We can do almost anything now. It’s, ‘What should be done?’ That’s the moral imperative that makes sure architecture is not just a commodity. If there’s no moral imperative then we’re cranking out shoes or refrigerators or cars. When you get to that point, someone says, ‘Here’s what I want to do. Do it for me.’ Yet it’s that incredible creative aspect that the design professions bring, to say, ‘What if we did something different? Not for the sake of being different, but let’s turn it upside-down and look at it and see if maybe there’s something we were missing.’ The responsibility of architects today is to get to the decision-makers before they make the decision. It’s being on the policy side so you’re able to say, ‘Instead of doing that building, maybe we should do a smaller addition and two renovations.’

You seem to think as much like an urban planner as you do as an architect.

I remember when I was working with [former Portland Mayor Neil] Goldschmidt on Pioneer Place. We got down to the three finalists and visited with them. We had all the boards and presentation materials. Neil had moved to DC [to be the US Secretary of Transportation] and came back. I said, ‘Do you want to see what we chose?’ We were really excited about this three-block development downtown and these great boards that Rouse had developed. Neil came in and said, ‘It looks great. But what are you doing about JC Penney? What are you doing about the old bookstore?’ He was two steps ahead of everyone. He said, ‘This is great, but it doesn’t help the city if it puts JC Penney out of business or you lose JK Gill.’ You’re looking at a bigger chessboard. And you’re trying to get people to say, ‘I know you need that 60,000 square feet but think of what the next move is. Don’t make a move that two moves down the line will not allow you to do something even more spectacular. And there’s a lot of good examples of that, where people are rushing into what I would call premature decisions. Part of what we need to do as architects is step back and say, ‘We’re imaginative people. Let’s use our imaginations.’

How have things changed over your career with respect to that kind of civic planning and ambition?

Twenty years ago, the public sector had a lot more money. They brought more dollars to the table. Once the money dried up and they became facilitators of the city rather than real leaders You’d ask, ‘What’s the big move?’ We had the Blazers or a baseball team looking to relocate. There were civic things motivated by the fact that the public sector needed more than just talk. Once they were undercut financially, they lost their nerve in some ways. I was lucky enough to participate in a time that was about leveraging what you did have. The attitude was not, ‘What can you do?’ or ‘What can’t you do?’ It was, ‘What should you do?’ It wasn’t restrictive. It was, ‘How do we solve it?’

I remember being on the planning team for the first part of South Waterfront. We the best economic resource consultants out of Los Angeles and San Francisco. They said, ‘Housing just won’t work.’ We said, ‘Well, we want housing .’ They said, ‘It just won’t work.’ We sat at the table and finally at one of the meetings with Larry Dully, who was leading the process for PDC, we said, ‘we’re asking the wrong question.’ So we turned to the economists and said, ‘Assume that housing is an integral part of what we do. Tell us what we have to do to accomplish it.’ Don’t just say what works, because we’ll just get the same formula. And they came up with some creative ideas that allowed housing to proceed. Previously the best thing they suggestsed was a shopping center. Give us a break!

SRG's offices overlook Pioneer Courthouse Square from a classic A.E. Doyle-designed building from the early 20th century. How does the urban setting outside your window reflect the kind of work you like to embrace as planner and architect?

It speaks to the power of mid-rise high density. You look at the differences between what’s happening in South Waterfront and what’s happening in the earlier portions of the Pearl District. The mid-rise high density allows me to sit here and see people’s faces. This time of year you’ll start getting the guitarist on the corner or the bell-ringer for Christmas. You talk about connectivity. I practiced for a year and a half on the 16th floor of what was the Georgia Pacific building where you don’t have that kind of connectivity.

When you talk about density from and urban point of view, the important part is you want not only this visual connectivity, but also the physical connectivity. If you have to walk 400 feet before you can turn 90 degrees, that’s not successful. You’ve got to be able to move laterally and be able to have greater choice. When you do that you’ve got shafts of light coming in, you’ve got some other view corridors. It’s not just about low-rise or high-rise or mid-rise. The density is the denominator that makes the urbanism.

What do you love best about the job and what is your skillset?

I’m practicing today because it’s probably the most exciting period in 50 years. There’s no real dominant ideology, so everything can be evenly examined. We’ve got technology at levels unperceived when I began in the early parts of the profession. We’re able to visualize in animations all kinds of situations. We’re able to test lighting and glare. Just the whole technical level is at a point where we can look at issues in a much more intellectual manner than just intuitively.

The second aspect is the profile of the people you work with. When I started in Berkeley in the early ‘60s, the joke was that only the plumbers had less diversity than architects. Architecture was just a bunch of gray old men. Now, just take a look. I cannot practice today without being surrounded by people of all ages, nationalities, and different skills. Never before has it been more collaborative or more team-oriented.

You know the famous story of Edgar Kaufman getting ticked off at Frank Lloyd Wright and wanting to see how the house was coming. He got on the phone and said, ‘I’m getting in my car and I’m going to be up there in three hours.’ Wright had been doing other things and procrastinating. He sat down wildly for a few hours, and Fallingwater appeared by the time Kaufman arrived. We don’t have that today. It’s not within the mind of one person. So what you require are really great team players and collaborators.

I pride myself on having been around long enough to know that I’m an idea person. I’m not a detail person. You can talk about craft and say how wonderful craft is, and you’ll put me to sleep sooner or later. And that’s why we have people that really can do that well. I’m more interested in putting together combinations of things that haven’t been done before. ‘Why not have the psychologist in the office.’ Why not do this or why shouldn’t other things occur?’ It’s that ‘What if?’ aspect that generates new ideas. That, plus working with the creative people we have. We’ve never had stronger talent than right now – in our office or in the profession.

Local architects and members of the design profession have been taking home numerous honors lately. Here's a roundup of their awards and acknowledgements.

Portland State University architecture professor L. Rudolph Barton has been awarded a Fulbright visiting professorship to the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland for the 2014-2015 academic year. Barton is the first PSU professor to receive a Fulbright Scholar Award to travel to the United Kingdom. The highly competitive award allows Barton to spend six months, from January to June, working with the Urban Lab of the Mackintosh School of Architecture and urban design staff with the city of Glasgow. The goals of the research project include developing an urban design case study of Glasgow, as well as creating reciprocal exchange programs between PSU and the Glasgow School of Art and strategic partnerships between the cities of Portland and Glasgow.

“The city of Glasgow and Scotland itself are major success stories in innovative urban design. Glasgow has transformed itself from something of an industrial wasteland into one of Europe’s most energetic, creative cultural centers," Barton said. "I hope to bring back a few ideas so that Portland, and Oregon, can learn from Glasgow’s example.”

Architect-educator Don Peting, founding director of the Pacific Northwest Preservation Field School at the University of Oregon, is being honored with the 2014 George McMath Historic Preservation Award, presented each year to an individual whose contributions have raised awareness and advocacy for historic preservation in Oregon.

Cameron Huber's perFORM 2014 design (image courtesy Hammer & Hand)

University of Oregon undergraduate architecture student Cameron Huber has won the $2,000 first-place award for his entry in the "perFORM 2014: A House Design Competition" sponsored by Hammer & Hand (a sponsor of this site). The contest challenged emerging architects to fuse high design with high-performance building in designing a single-family house “that achieves Passive House-like levels of energy performance while being resourceful, replicable, and beautiful.”

“The goal of this project was to loosely follow Passive House standards in order to achieve a high performance envelope and overall system, while creating a truly flexible environment or a forward thinking family," Huber said. "There is far more that goes into sustainability than what can be shown on an energy spreadsheet.”

The Architecture Foundation of Oregon has named Art Johnson, who founded Portland’s KPFF Consulting Engineers 40 years ago, as its annual Honored Citizen. Johnson built KPFF into the premiere structural engineering office in the region, which also supports a robust international export program of its design expertise. Johnson is the first structural engineer to receive the award, which goes to a non-architect member of the architecture and design community for lifetime contributions to the built environment.

The new Veterinary and Biomedical Research Building on Washington State University’s Pullman campus, designed by Portland firm SRG Partnership, has received R&D Magazine's Lab of the Year award. Designed by SRG, the VBRB was one of four projects recognized internationally, receiving a High Honors Award. The competition showcases emerging thinking, sustainable practices, and creative responses to challenges in the design, construction and operation of modern laboratories.

Portland firm Yost Grube Hall Architecture received an Award of Honor for the Health Careers Center for Central Oregon Community College in Bend, Oregon. The 47,000 square foot facility also received a Hammurabi Award in February from the Masonry and Ceramic Tile Institute of Oregon.

Yesterday two local projects by Portland firms were named to the American Institute of Architects Committee on The Environment's annual Top 10 list of the nation's best sustainable designs: the Bud Clark Commons by Holst Architecture and the Edith Green Wendell Wyatt Federal Building modernization by Cutler Anderson (of Bainbridge Island, Washington) in partnership with SERA Architects.

The two projects join a handful of Oregon buildings that have been named to the list since its inception in 1997, but with increasing regularity in recent years, including the Mercy Corps headquarters (designed by THA Architecture), PCC Newberg (designed by Hennebery Eddy) and the Hood River Middle School Music & Sciences building, all in 2012, as well as 12 West (by ZGF) in 2010, Eugene's Wayne Morse US Courthouse (by Santa Monica, California's Morphosis) in 2007, and the Bank of Astoria (by Tom Bender with SERA). The Lloyd Crossing Sustainable Design Plan by Seattle's Mithun was also named to the list in 2005.

"We are very excited to have been selected for this award because it recognizes the importance of uniting good design and sustainability," SERA's Lisa Petterson said by email. "Working with our design excellence partner, Jim Cutler, to integrate place-based/climate requirements early really enhanced the design. The biggest lesson learned from the EGWW project was how important having specific performance targets was on creating a culture of success both for sustainability and design."

(You can click here for a 2012 interview I did with James Cutler about the Wyatt for this blog, or click here for a 2013 interview I did with Cutler about the buiding for Architect magazine.)

The Wyatt Federal Building Project was originally planned as an occupied remodel, but was restarted in 2009 by the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA) as a more extensive re-imagining that existing 18-story, 512,474-square-foot office tower (orignially completed in 1974) stripped down to its steel framing. ARRA legislation required the design team to meet the requirements of the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA), including 55% fossil fuel reduction (compared to a code-designed building), 30% energy usage reduction, 20% indoor potable water reduction and 50% outdoor potable water reduction. "Having a specific goal to meet allowed the team to determine if they were meeting the goal, and to keep designing until the goal was reached," Petterson added.

The Wyatt used to be a drab, forgettable office building. Now, it stands out in a big way because of two bold design moves: the exterior screens shading the west facade, and the slanted top. Both are based in sustainable, functional design moves: filtering glare with the screens and optimizing solar panels with the diagonal roof. But each is also an aesthetic move, so much so that the building has an almost post-modern quality.

It's a trend I have increasingly noticed amongst leading-edge sustainable design projects. The Bullitt Center in Seattle, for example, which is the first US office building in the United States to meet rigid Living Building Challenge standards, has an almost cartoonishly large roof that stretches seemingly for acres past its facade. It's done to maximize diffuse natural light without glare, a worthy functional effort, yet aesthetically it seems to have an oversized sense of proportion. I'm unquestionably a fan of the Edith Green Wendell Wyatt, but if I were judging it on a purely aesthetic basis its to signature moves, the facade screens and the slanted top, would seem too large.

Thankfully when you achieve such optimal performance as the Wyatt does, we needn't judge the building superficially on aesthetics alone.

It was a little surprising to see the Bud Clark Commons, which was completed in 2011, named to this list in 2014. But eligibility for the honor stretches back 10 years, and besides: it was not at all surprising to see the AIA's Committe on the Environment found the project worthy of honor.

"We are extremely honored to be the recipients of what we consider one of the most challenging sustainable design awards programs in the nation," Holst partner Jeff Stuhr said by email. "For over 15 years, we have promoted and integrated green strategies into our work. For us, and perhaps most importantly, we believe that building timeless architecture - projects that will stand for a century or more – is the most sustainable thing a firm can do.”

Bud Clark Commons (photos by Sally Schoolmaster)

The LEED Platinum-rated project provides a walk-in day center for the homeless with with a 90-bed temporary shelter as well as 130 studio apartments for homeless men or women seeking permanent housing with support services. An estimated $60,000 per year is being saved on energy thanks to investments such as one of the region's largest solar hot water heating systems, a tight thermal envelope to reduce heating loads, and a heat recovery system for residential unit. All told, the building performs 51% better than code in terms of energy efficiency and 53% better in water efficiency.

Not only is the Bud Clark Commons impressively efficient, but it serves as a striking symbol of Portland's 10-year effort to end homelessness in the city. Situated on NW Broadway between Old Town and the Pearl District, it's part of a kind of gateway into downtown and its form exemplifies Holst's long track record of exceptionally attractive, refined architecture. Though simple in form, a pair of long, rectangular brick volumes, Holst gives the building kinetic energy and charm with color and natural wood details.

If there's any downside to the project, it'sperhaps not the the design but its expense. The Bud Clark Commons cost $28.75 million (not including land) for its 106,000 square feet. In the future, if Portland is really going to forcefully address homelessness, we might need to compliment such an impressive flagship as Bud Clark Commons with some pragmatic, high-bed-count solutions too. But the Wyatt had a very similar per-square-foot cost. To look at first costs alone is of course to paint an incomplete picture. These buildings will ultimately save millions through their efficiency.

Meanwhile, having multiple Portland projects on the prestigius AIA/COTE Top Ten for the second time in three years gives a whole lot of validation to the idea that our city's design community is leading the way nationally. For all the jokes about our "Portlandia" DNA of bearded hipsters engaged in artisanal crocheting or pickling, the truth is that our culture thrives on innovation, not just as a means to make money but to create a more lasting sense of place. Bud Clark Commons and the Edith Green Wendell Wyatt Federal Building embody this tradition and move it forward.

Last Friday's annual AIA/Portland Design Awards saw two projects in the Willamette Valley win the evening's top prize, the Honor Award: Allied Works Architecture's Sokol Blosser Winery Tasting Room near Dayton in rural Yamhill County, and ZGF's Hatfield-Dowlin Complex for the University of Oregon, outside Autzen Stadium in Eugene.

These are two firms very familiar with AIA/Portland Design Awards, including the Honor Award. Familiar too are some of the night's other winning firms, such as Skylab Architecture, THA Architecture, Hennebery Eddy, Lever Architecture, and Opsis Architecture. There are many excellent firms in this city, some of which don't have a closet ful of awards. But the consistency with which these firms win year after year is no coincidence.

Honor Awards

Allied's 5,000 square foot Sokol Blosser Winery Tasting Room opened this summer, and it represents the growth of Oregon's wine industry. Sokol Blosser, one of the region's pioneering wineries, had relied on the same basic tasting room since the early 1970s, and visitors would often drive up, see it was already overflowing, and turn around. Allied's task was to create a bigger space, yet not to tower over the beautiful rolling hills with some faux-Mediterranean monstrosity, like many big wineries do. “We wanted to make it look like it just grew up out of the earth,” Alison Sokol-Blosser told Portland Monthly's Sam Coggeshall earlier this year.

The design is comprised of numerous cedar-clad interior spaces carved into the hillside. “It’s this crazy labyrinth,” Cloepfil told Coggeshall. “It’s the valley’s first piece of contemporary architecture that really responds to where it is—to landscape, earth, and light.” Along the way, Sokol Blosser gives Cloepfil an addition to his portfolio of Oregon projects. Allied first gained acclaim with the Wieden + Kennedy building in the Pearl District in 2000, quickly followed by the 2281 Glisan Building. But since then much of the firm's work has been out of town. Paired with Allied's under-construction rehabilitation of the historic 511 Broadway building for PNCA (as well as a collection of houses and work for Catlin Gable school), Sokol Blosser helps give the top Portland architect of his generation more of a local footing.

Although Sokol Blosser may not be Allied's most prominent project given its portfolio includes major art museums in Seattle, New York and Dallas, there may not be another building that better represents Cloepfil's signature talent for envisioning buildings situated seamlessly within the Oregon landscape, poised to receive a bounty of light.

ZGF's Honor Award for the Hatfield-Dowlin Complex at UO is another confirmation of the architectural partnership between the university, Nike, and a design team led by Gene Sandoval (with interiors by Firm 151). This architect-client combination already had been responsible for the magnificent Jacqua Center at the University of Oregon, which previously won an AIA/Portland Honor Award. Sitting beside Autzen Stadium, Hatfield-Dowlin feels like Rotterdam on the Willamette: a series of crisp interlocking rectangular volumes that poetically blend metal, glass and black granite. Nike and co-founder Phil Knight's multi-million-dollar benefaction meant that this project had an uncommonly high budget, but budgets alone do not make first-rate architecture. From the elegance of the materials to the way light moves in and out of the space to an exceptionally clever array of graphics, art and multimedia, Hatfield-Dowlin is greater than the sum of its meticulous parts.

Merit Awards

The next tier of awards, known as the Merit Award, went to two projects: the Colonel Nesmith Readiness Center in Dallas, Oregon by THA Architecture, and the Portland Bureau of Environmental Services' Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant Engineering Building, by Skylab Architecture in collaboration with Solarc.

The Colonel James Nesmith Readiness Center provides training facilities, recruiting, administrative and family support spaces for the Oregon Army National Guard. THA's design, targeted for LEED Gold and also received a Design-Build Institute of America national design award, is situated around its main assembly hall, which filters daylight from skylights through a wood framework reminiscent of the wooden barns common to this rural area, yet with a more highly ordered geometry. This is the latest in a long line of restrained yet elegant THA public building projects, a firm specialty. The firm previously known as Thomas Hacker Architects is showing that, even as its namesake founder increasingly hands the reigns to a new generation, the quality remains just as high.

The CBWTP Engineering Building provides offices and support spaces for Bureau of Environmental Services staff. "Oriented radially along the path of the sun, the building will feature a rooftop that folds up and down," says Architizer. "As the seven separate folds of the roof tilt, in sawtooth rhythm, clerestory windows fill the void created by the upward fold, responding to the movement of natural light and airflow. The downward fold drains the landscaped roof runoff into a berm on the south facade and bioswales return the stormwater to the Columbia Slough. The folded roof combined with a north-oriented, louvered and operable glass facade, will allow daylight and natural ventilation to fill the interior during working hours and make possible night flush cooling. The building's hydronic system will connect to the plant water flow, efficiently heating and cooling. The entrance to the plant will be modified to provide a native and adaptive environment, creating a public space in front of the building with views to an existing pond. A newly landscaped commons area will be accessible to the plant staff as well as for educational tours of plant operations for the public. A circular open space in the center will feature landscaping and interpretive features demonstrating water treatment strategies."

Citation Awards

The next tier of award went to two built and two unbuilt projects. In the unbuilt category, Lever Architecture won for ArtHouse, the new dormitory for the Pacific Northwest College of Art located on the North Park Blocks. With natural light filtering into its deepest interiors and a bold undulating metal facade, ArtHouse helps mark Lever's arrival as one of the city's most talented firms. The firm previously won an AIA Honor Award for its work in Southern California for some major Hollywood studios, but ArtHouse, arriving within months of the Union Way project (which also was honored this year by the AIA), showed that Lever founder Thomas Robinson's talents reflect his time at two of the world's best firms: Allied Works and Herzog & DeMeuron.

The other built Citation Award went to the Cascades Academy of Central Oregon in Bend by Hennebery Eddy. Besides winning a slough of past design awards, the firm has made highly sustainable college and university projects its bread and butter, be it the net-zero Portland Community College facility in Newberg, Oregon or this new project. Hennebery Eddy's architecture also feels somehow quintessentially Northwest, teeming with wood and light.

Hennebery Eddy also won a Citation Award this year for the unbuilt Fire Station 76 in Gresham, a series of simple rectangular and triangular volumes that alternate transparency and solidity while showing off the firm's experience with fire stations. Every time I drive down Sandy Boulevard in Portland, I smile at the firm's design for Fire Station 28, which combined a historic existing building with an entirely modern wing next door - the two buildings are surprisingly congruent, an exercise in interweaving old and new architecture.

THA Architecture's design for the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Central Oregon made the firm a repeat winner on Friday night with its unbuilt Citation Award. Although the building's form is boxy, its glass curtain wall makes for not only a compelling display of visual kinetics but also is a nod to traditional eclesiastical stained glass. Corey Martin, formerly of PATH Architecture, led this design, reflecting his imprint on the firm.

Other Awards

This year the Bend area was well represented in the AIA Design Awards, including a Craftsmanship Award for the Central Oregon Community College Science Building by YGH Architecture and Bend firm Pinnacle Architecture.

The Sustainability Award went to another THA project, the Bayview Branch Library in San Francisco, which the firm designed in partnership with SF firm Karin Payson Architecture + Design.

A Special Award for Adaptive Reuse went to the Galleria building rehabilitation into a City Target, by Portland's FFA Architecture and Interiors in tandem with Alameda, California's MBH Architects. The design completely eradicated any last semblance of the old Galleria building interior, which is disappointing to those of us who grew up going to the building's atrium of small shops, but it's an urbanistic triumph, maintaining the integrity of the historic Galleria exterior while exemplifying a new model of urban Target stores.

Two projects won the People's Choice Award. First place went to Opsis Architecture's design of the Reed College Performing Arts Building, which expertly balances contemporary lines with consideration of the school's early 20th century campus buildings. Second place went to Union Way, the Lever Architecture-designed shopping alley in Portland's West End.

If there's one project I think got shortchanged from the AIA jury, it's this one. It may only have created a series of storefronts fronting a new urban alley, but both the program and the execution are exemplary.

Union Way (photo by Jeremy Bitterman)

Luckily, Union Way also won the Mayor's Award for Design Excellence. "The team for that project took two nondescript buildings that most of us have never noticed and, by cutting an alley through them, transformed them into a place of interest and delight," Mayor Charlie Hales commented. "Like the sculptor that sees a statue inside a block of stone, the Union Way team saw a great place just waiting to be uncovered. They have created something that is beautiful to look at. They have created something that is a delight to experience. And they have created something that can help all of look at our urban fabric in a different way. That is truly great design."

Recent months have seen Portland firms take home a number of
awards, from projects to the work of individual architects. As we dive into the
fall arts season, let’s take a moment to acknowledge the acknowledgements.

Holst Architecture,
for example, has received the Project of the Year award from Residential
Architect magazine’s 2013 Design Awards for the Bud Clark Commons. Featuring
130 studio apartments for residents who have been experiencing homelessness,
the project beat out a host of swanky houses. Think of it: people not long ago
living on park benches and under bridges now occupying space that’s won a
design award over mansions.

“I just assumed
we were going to pick a house or an apartment that showed the expertise of the
architect and their use of the best materials in creating the best spaces,”
juror Brian Messana said. “But this project to me encapsulates all of that.”

“Good design should be available to everybody,” fellow juror
EB Min added. “That’s one of the tenets of modernism. I think this project
really addresses that. When we’re talking about residential architecture,
everyone just jumps to think about single-family homes. But this is a residence
as well. And beyond the social program, the design itself is lovely. As a piece
of architecture in Portland, it functions beautifully. It’s a great addition to
the cityscape as well.”

Holst's Bud Clark Commons (photo by Brian Libby)

“We chose to offer this as an example to everyone: that you
can achieve something for a relatively mundane, straightforward project that
usually is not treated very well,” concurred juror Robert M. Cain. “It goes
beyond.”

Meanwhile, Portland’s THA Architecture is the recipient of the 2013 Region Firm Award from
the American Institute of Architects’ Northwest and Pacific Region.

“Two interrelated qualities stand out about THA
Architecture. The first is the breadth of consistency they achieve from concept
to detail and the beautiful work that results. Second, is the quality and focus
of the firm’s culture and the way it infuses itself into every aspect of the
firm’s highly evolved practice.”

The award may denote a generational arrival for THA. Once
known as Thomas Hacker Architects, the firm has moved beyond the shadow of its
talented founder, Hacker, who studied under Louis Kahn and who, as a University
of Oregon professor, influenced a number of acclaimed architects like Brad
Cloepfil and Rick Potestio. Now, however, THA principals like David Keltner,
Becca Cavell and more recent addition Corey Martin are playing leading roles.
The firm continues to make public buildings such as museums and higher
education facilities its bread and butter, but is also moving further into
condos, apartments and other residential projects.

Bayview Library, San Francisco (photo by Bruce Damonte)

Recent THA projects, for example, include the Hallie Ford
Center at Oregon State University in Corvallis and the Bayview Library in San
Francisco, with a number of others under construction: the State of Alaska
Library Archives Museum in Juneau, 3339 SE Division (an apartment building) in
Portland, and the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Central Oregon in Bend.

THA also received another honor recently, as did two other Portland firms.

YGH Architecture
also was honored recently. Architect Lona Rerick, who directs the firm’s
sustainability efforts, received 2013 BetterBricks Award in the Building Design
category. The award recognizes her leadership in the Pacific Northwest’s green
building community and her many accomplishments in sustainable design during
her more than 10-year career with YGH. While at the firm, she has led or played
a significant role in the sustainability strategies for numerous projects, many
of which earned LEED Gold or Earth Advantage Gold certification and have
realized energy consumption rates ranging from 30 to 45 percent below current
code requirements.

Rerick is a former chair of the AIA Portland, Oregon
Chapter’s Committee on the Environment and has served as the head of YGH’s
Sustainability Committee since 2002, helping lead the firm through The Natural
Step planning process. Additionally, she is instrumental in coordinating YGH’s
efforts to meet the AIA 2030 Commitment, which sets guidelines that move
buildings to carbon neutrality by the year 2030. She also currently sits on the
National Sustainable Design Leaders Group, an elite selection of nationally
recognized green champions.

Students Jason Rood, Alex Kenton and Ben Bye (image courtesy University of Oregon)

Architecture students from the University of Oregon also recently won first place in the "Timber
in the City: Urban Habitats" contest, an international competition of the
Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.

Called upon to design a mixed-use facility for a site in
Brooklyn, New York, a team that included UO architecture undergraduates
Benjamin Bye, Alex Kenton and Jason Rood used cross-laminated timber as a new
building technology to create a cost-effective, environmentally friendly
solution for creating livable and recreational areas that support a wide range
of daily activities for residents. The UO students’ work was chosen from 1,000
entries.

Two local firms already quite familiar with winning AIA Design Awards from the Portland chapter of the American Institute of Architects, Allied Works and Skylab Architecture, walked away with the top prize at a ceremony held October 26. Allied's Clyfford Still Museum in Denver and Skylab's Nike Camp Victory in Eugene each received the Honor Award from this year's jury: Trey Trahan of Trahan Architects in Baton Rouge, Stella Betts of LevenBetts in New York City, and Joe Day of Deegan Day Design in Los Angeles.

The Clyfford Still Museum continues an impressive streak of high-profile art museums Allied Works and founder Brad Cloepfil have designed in cities around the country: the St. Louis Contemporary, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Museum of Art & Design in New York, among others. And this new Denver project may be the most acclaimed of them all.

Clyfford Still Museum (photo by Jeremy Bitterman)

"The building is just a box, albeit one the architect has shaped so that its proportions are perfect, its textures alive with light, and its interiors an oasis of clear frames for Still’s gestures and forms," wrote Aaron Betsky of Cloepfil and Allied's design in Architect magazine. "It is a box that does not pander to its site, nor tries to disappear. It answers it with architecture, which is to say with an articulation of a wholly human response to that place. 'The figure stands behind all of my work,' Still said of his art, and now architecture of the highest quality frames that figure."

Along with the Honor Award, the Clyfford Still Museum also won the AIA's annual Craftsmanship Award the same night.

Nike's Camp Victory, constructed outside the University of Oregon's Hayward Field for the Olympic Trials, continues a tradition of compelling temporary architecture by Portland architects, recalling Boora Architects' creations of years past for PICA's Time-Based Art festival. Skylab has also received numerous honors in the past, including an Honor Award in 2008 for a mixed-use building on SW 12th Avenue, an Unbuilt Merit Award from the AIA last year for the Bureau of Environmental Services' Columbia Boulevard Support Facility, an Unbuilt Citation Award in 2010 for the Weave Building.

Nike Camp Victory (image courtesy Skylab & Hush Studio)

The next tier of AIA distinction, the Merit Award, went to two projects: the Mountbatten Nantechnology Electronics Research Complex at the University of Southampton by IDC Architects, and the Panther Lake Elementary School in Seattle by DLR Group. That means the top six awards of the night all went to projects outside Portland.

What's more, although IDC and DLR both have offices in Portland (they each are headquartered elsewhere with numerous offices in other cities), making them eligible for the awards (either the location of the project itself or the competing firm has to come from here), of the firm team members listed by the AIA for each winning project, few to none of the names I searched on seemed to be based here. Locations like Pittsburgh, Glassgow, Toronto and Seattle came up as home bases instead.

That's not to say there weren't people from IDC's and DLR's Portland offices working on these projects; I'm sure there were, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to enter. What's more, we should judge these projects on the merits of the designs, as the jury did. Both projects seem impressive, too. It would be provincial and silly to be nitpicky about what constitutes an eligible project for these awards, for we need all the talent we can get that wants to associate itself with the city. But perhaps this just highlights the fact that this year's awards had a decidedly less local bent.

The next round, a kind of bronze medal called the Citation Award, went to another out-of-town project but this one by a firm headquartered here: the Wagner Noel Performing Art Center at University of Texas-Permian Basin in Odessa, Texas by Boora Architects (with an assist from Rhoteenberry Wellen Architects of Midland, Texas). Boora has found a niche designing performing arts venues for smaller cities and larger suburbs, such as the Mesa Art Center in Arizona.

A Citation Award also went to the Portland firm Architecture Building Culture for the Stubbs Residence in Seattle, which imaginatively and fearlessly combines a historic home with a new addition equal in size and contrastingly modern in style. I've always been a lover of hybrid architecture such as this, where a new addition doesn't ape the original structure but makes itself a new chapter in the story of the building.

And while other winners like Boora, Skylab, IDC and DLR are all established firms with enough employees to compete for major institutional projects, ABC and founder Brian Cavenaugh are an up and comer. Cavenaugh already won a national Young Architects Award earlier this year from the AIA. Although nothing's guaranteed, perhaps ABC could become the Allied or Skylab of Portland's future.

One unbuilt project, THA Architecture's design of a new headquarters for Portland advertising and graphic design firm Downstream, won the evening's Unbuilt Merit Award. Due to difficulties with developing the site, Downsteam has reportedly since decided to renovate an existing building rather than build this headquarters, but that's all the more reason to give this design its moment in the sun. Someday someone should curate an exhibit of the best Portland Architeture that was never built, from the Delta Dome to the Weave Building. Might this project make that cut?

Downstream headquarters (rendering courtesy THA Architecture)

Another film familiar to the AIA Portland Design Awards, Works Partnership, took this year's Sustainability Award, for a storefront commercial building called the Washougal Incubator that seeks to invigorate that small Washington town's historic downtown core. Works won an Honor Award last year for the Tandem residential project in Portland, and the firm's heretofore signature project, the bSide6 building, received an Honor Award in 2009. The firm has also received numerous AIA awards for unbuilt work.

For the past decade or so, our city's leader has chosen the annual Mayor's Award for Design Excellence. This year Sam Adams chose the Randall Children's Hospital at Legacy Emanuel, designed by ZGF. In each of his prior three years, Adams had chosen housing: Works Partnership's Tandem Duo in 2011, SERA Architects' Patton Park Apartments and PATH Architecture's Williams Five Condominiums in 2009.

And finally, the People's Choice Award went to two projects. First place among these was Boora's Vernonia Schools (a single K-12 project despite the pluralized name), which replaced a high school, middle school and grade school that were decimated when the small Coast Range town experienced major flooding in 2007. The second-place People's Choice Award went to DLR Group's design of another small-town educational facility: the Scappoose High School Auditorium, headed by a Portland-based team of Scott Rose, Levi Patterson and Kent Larson.

What does October mean to you? Maybe it's about football season kicking into high gear. Maybe you're keen to stay outdoors before the rains arrive. Maybe you're caught up in the presidential race, or busy hanging Halloween decorations with your kids. But autumn is also when the arts kick into high gear, and for architects and design enthusiasts, each October brings the annual Architecture + Design Festival.

Presented by Portland's American Institute of Architects chapter but in partnership with a host of local design and arts organizations, A+D 2012 kicked off a few days ago with an opening night party at the chapter's Center For Architecture (newly minted as an independent nonprofit). Festivities continue tonight with a First Thursday celebration, also at the CFA (403 NW 11th Avenue), featuring an installation by Jordan Tull called "Ecto-Paraprism," which Tull describes as not as something from Ghostbusters but "a flexible crystalline facade that feeds off the existing core of AIA PDX. The installation explores transparency, reflection and ownership in a dynamic relationship between host architecture and parasitic intervention. Ecto-Paraprism redefines and dominates an existing structural facade to provide a temporary and alternative visual orientation for AIA PDX."

There are also two lectures this week, including a free one tonight at Portland State University's Shattuck Hall Annex by New York architect Dan Wood of WORKac called "Architects create places, not spaces,” as part of the Department of Architecture's 2012-13 lecture series. (Many already-existing events by other local entities are additionally placed under the A+D Fest banner.) Saturday brings "Electrifying Times: Streetcars and the Building of Portland" at the Architectural Heritage Center (701 SE Grand, $10-13).

Next week starts with a panel discussion on Monday, October 8 at the Center For Architecture (5:30PM, $10-15), part of the International Interior Design Association local chapter's monthly discussion forums. It promises that "compelling members of the Portland design community will be gathered to discuss the integral role collaboration plays in the emerging multi-disciplinary design industry." There's also a Tuesday film screening at 6PM for Detroit Wild City (CFA, 403 NW 11th, free) by French documentarian Florent Tillon, hailed as "a poetic portrait of the dystopian ‘Motor City’ where grass is growing in parking lots and building after building is crumbling apart." What can America's Pompeii tell us here in the Next American City?

Saturday, October 13 brings a trio of events. First, beginning at 10AM, there's "Design Matters: A Tour of Exceptional Portland Homes" ($40), featuring seven houses by a compelling variety of Portland firms. There is Skylab's HOMB, for example, a new prefab housing model that has been constructed in Portland for the first time this fall. There are also two renovations, one of a 1950s ranch house by Paul McKean (a past winner of the top local AIA design award) and another a rehab of the circa-1958 "Home of Tomorrow" by Donald Blair and William Fletcher, an AIA winner from back in 1960. Also included is the striking wood-festooned Graham Towers duplex, one of the last projects by PATH Architecture before lead designer Corey Martin left for THA Architecture.

Skylab's HOMB concept (rendering courtesy Skylab & Method Homes)

If you're not looking to drive all over town for the homes tour, October 13th also brings a lecture by architect-historian William Hawkins, also at 10AM called "Greek Revival Style in the Oregon Territory,1839-1859" ($10-18) at the Architectural Heritage Center (701 SE Grand). There's also the ASLA Design Awards, honoring the best in local landscape arcthitecture (6PM, Tiffany Center ballroom, 1410 SW Morrison, $65-85).

October 16 brings two more events, both at 6PM. A lecture at the University of Oregon (70 NW Couch, free) called "Material Computation" will be delivered by Achim Menges, architect and professor at the Institute for Computational Design at the University of Stuttgart. A pioneer in construction innovation, Menges will discuss how material characteristics can drive architectural form using computational techniques, which promotes an understanding of form, material and structure not as separate elements, but rather as complex interrelations. At the same time, there's a screening of the film How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? (CFA, 403 NW 11th, free). Directors Norberto Lopez Amado & Carlos Carcas profile the British starchitect Norman Foster with a blend of curiosity and reverence. It seems unfortunate that both events take place at the same time. If they were staggered, one could make an evening of it.

On October 18, the AIA's Committee on the Environment hosts the latest Pecha Kucha night (CFA, 403 NW 11th, free), in which participants show up to 20 slides each in no more than 20 second increments, with the topic of what sustainability means to design professionals, community members, educators, artists, and members of the community (Center For Architecture, free). The Bosco-Milligan Foundation's 17th annual "Riches of a City" auction is scheduled for Saturday, October 20 (Melody Ballroom, 615 Southeast Alder, $75-100).

The highlight of any Architecture + Design Fest is the annual AIA Design Awards, which this year are scheduled for Friday, October 26 at The Plant (935 SE Alder, $50). This year the event is actually called "DesignmiX" and features a series of sculptural objects (or "follies") on display created by designers and architects. The "DesignmiX" is preceded by An Evening With the Jury on Thursday, October 25 (CFA, 403 NW 11th, $5), in which the Design Awards jurors (from New York, Los Angeles and Baton Rouge) discuss their impressions of Portland.

There are even more events happening during the A+D Fest than I've listed here. Check out the event website for more details - and then go out and get inspired.

While Portland may have lost its lead as the most bike-able
city to Minneapolis, and one publication now ranks ours as only the ninth
greenest city in the country, we are arguably still at the forefront when it
comes to green design, as evidenced by having three projects on the 2012 AIA
COTE Top Ten list: the Mercy Corps Word Headquarters, Hood River Middle School,
and Portland Community College’s Newberg Center. Earlier this week, The
University of Oregon’s Architecture Department hosted a panel discussion
featuring key members from each of these projects’ design teams.

The Mercy Corps World Headquarters, designed by THA
Architecture, is a LEED Platinum project that combines an existing historic
structure with a modern addition. Open offices were placed on the outer edge
near the windows, in the historic portion, and core and service elements were
located toward the center. In the modern addition, the entire East elevation is
a curtain wall shaded by street trees.
The project has a 3,800 square-foot green roof, stack ventilation
through the main staircase, and re-used timber stair treads.

Hood River Middle School Music and Science Building,
designed by Opsis and set to achieve net-zero energy usage (generating as much
as it consumes), is located within the context of a larger school that is on
the National Historic Register. The building’s design demanded an acute
consideration of the natural context, the historic fabric, and the school’s
sustainable/ science curriculum. The project has a geothermal heating system
with heat exchange recovery ventilators, a radiant floor slab, and high mass
walls for thermal storage. Trusses and other materials were salvaged from the
demolition of a buss storage barn previously located on the site for re-use in
the new roof structure.

Portland Community College- Newberg Center, by
Hennebery-Eddy, is the first of six buildings planned for this newest PCC
campus. A net-zero project like Hood River, the building’s envelope is
insulated with structural insulated panels (SIPS). Sloped ceilings leading upward toward skylights provide
enough diffuse light to meet lighting needs during daytime hours. A series of
louvers and dampers, located below windows, bring fresh air into the building. Large stacks, located along the
building’s central axis, naturally vent air, while a109-kW photovoltaic array
generates all the space’s energy.

One panelist was quick to note that all three Portland
projects outperformed the others on the list, a good boost for Portland pride.
Projects are judged on a set of criteria including light and air, water cycle,
land use and site ecology, among others. Yet these panelists collectively
suggested several other driving forces rooted in our well-established
sustainable building culture.

For example, the clients of these projects were savvy and
didn’t need to be convinced into adopting strict sustainable goals, panelists
agreed. For Mercy Corps, a
sustainable building was in tandem with its official mission: “To alleviate suffering, poverty and oppression by helping
people build secure, productive and just communities.” PCC Newberg’s
President went to the design team with the goal of creating the most
sustainable building possible. At
Hood River Middle School, the curriculum being housed in the new building was
environmental, so the client wanted a sustainable building to showcase these
technologies in an educational way.

Government and nonprofit incentives also helped projects
along. The State of Oregon, for example, offers many financial incentives to promote
green design. PCC-Newberg took advantage of the Energy Trust of Oregon’s Path
to Net Zero program. The project’s
solar array as funded by a bond measure that stipulated 50% of project funds
had to go toward solar technology.

Hood River Middle School (video courtesy Opsis)

Having a high goal such as LEED Platinum or net zero focused
the clients’ attention and gave them something to rally behind, panelists also
said. For Hood River Middle School, the building itself was to be a tool for
sustainable education. Working with Opsis, they investigated all the ways net
zero strategies could also be used in the classroom. Building energy use
monitors are in visible locations for students. A portion of the wall was cut
back to reveal the construction. Students were involved in the process of
designing a living machine.

David Keltner of THA mentioned that Portland is already
positioned at a tipping point when it comes to our understanding of sustainable
technologies. For this type of
project to be successful, panelists agreed, it demands an integrated project
team of architects, engineers, contractor and client. There also must be industry buy-in. “Engineering something
that is not out there in everyone’s vocabulary is like designing a Ferrari,”
Alec Holser of Opsis said. Having professionals ready to work together to find
new approaches to meet these challenges was fundamental. In the case of net zero, many of the
technologies must solve two problems at once and then they need to work with
the other strategies. There is a complex balance, for example, between
daylighting and heat gains. The PCC innovative sloped ceiling helped spread the
light of a standard type and sized skylight.

Panelists were unanimous that net-zero projects are paving
the way for future invention and innovation in materials and technologies. As they become more of a norm, codes
too will need to be updated. Net
zero water usage is difficult to achieve when water recycled on site cannot be
reused in the landscape or restrooms.

Mercy Corps (photo by Jeff Amram)

A great lesson from these projects is that green buildings
can be designed in a way that educates their users. Whether it’s building
performance monitors or an architectural display of strategies on the facade,
the more users learn, the more comfortable users become with these buildings.
Through understanding there is change. When people know they are in a cutting
edge building with passive heating/ cooling they have different
expectations. Erica Dunn of
Hennebery Eddy cited that more people complain of being too hot when they have
AC than when they don’t because they are mentally prepared for a greater range
in temperatures. It’s really about common sense, Rob Reimer of Hennebery Eddy
said. “It’s not about gadgets or gizmos. Just designing a smart building.”

In the end, continually searching for new paradigms is
critical for advancing the design discourse. For example, David Keltner noted
there is always talk of reductions in energy use, but what about a
consideration of new forms of energy production? Our next step will entail a re-thinking that is even more
outside the box. It will be
interesting to see how this may shape the future of COTE Top Ten Green
Projects.

Since it began in 1997, the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment's annual Top Ten Green Projects list has been the highest honor a sustainable building project can achieve. Though Portland seemed to be an industry leader, for much of the past 15 years there have not been many projects by local firms to crack the list until ZGF's Twelve West finally did so in 2010 (although GBD Architects' Gerding Theater was an honorable mention in 2007).

This year, however, Portland is dominating the list, with three projects by Rose City firms in the just-announced Top Ten for 2012: the Mercy Corps headquarters in Old Town, designed by THA Architecture; Hood River Middle School, designed by Opsis, and the Portland Community College Newberg Center, designed by Hennebery Eddy. Maybe it helped having local architect Clark Brockman of SERA Architects on the six-person jury, or perhaps the fact that two of the three honored projects achieve net-zero energy usage was more of a factor. Regardless, this should help cement the city's status as a national sustainable design leader.

The Mercy Corps building occupies a prominent position along the Willamette riverfront, on Naito Parkway at the west edge of the Burnside Bridge. THA expanded the historic Packer-Scott building to go from 42,000 to 85,000 square feet. There's a green roof atop the building, and eventually there will be an array of solar panels operated and studied by students at the University of Oregon's Portland campus next door.

Mercy Corps received a top-level LEED Platinum rating, as well as a very low EUI (energy use intensity) score of 36, less than half the average of an office buiding. Potable water use was also reduced by 40 percent compared to a space designed to code specifications.

PCC Newberg (photos courtesy Hennebery Eddy)

The PCC Newberg building is the first structure in what will eventually be a 15-acre multi-building campus. It is constructed from structurally insulated panels (SIPs) that reduce heat loss from thermal bridging and air infiltration. The buildinng is naturally ventilated with louvers and double dampers to prevent drafts. As reported in Eco-Structure, "When outside temperatures dip below 55 F, heat-recovery ventilators condition fresh air, and the concrete slab circulates 90 F water through a closed-loop radiant system in the slab that then radiates heat to the building occupants. In warmer months, ceiling fans provide a 3 F drop in ambient temperature and use a fraction of the energy of a traditional air-conditioning unit. A 109-kilowatt rooftop PV array meets the center’s remaining energy needs."

Opsis Architecture's design for Hood River Middle School's new Music and Science Building is also net-zero for energy, thanks largely to its exterior envelope, be it well-insulated walls, triple-glazed windows, or detailing that prevents thermal bridging.

The main entrance, as Eco-Sructure also explains, "is purposefully sited at the inside corner of the building so that the mass of the concrete walls and a concrete slab shelter the entrance against winds from the Columbia Gorge. The thermal mass also buffers the interior spaces against seasonal temperature swings. Also contributing the net-zero-energy status is a tight envelope, a geothermal heating system, heat-exchange recovery ventilators, a radiant-heating system in the slab, and a 35-kilowatt solar PV system on the roof."

Besides its energy efficiency, all rainwater runoff at the new Hood River Middle School building gets collected and treated in a new bioswale, then is stored in a 14,000-gallon underground cistern, and then reused for irrigation in the student garden. All told, some 123,000 gallons of water will be saved annually. As someone raised in the next town over from Newberg, McMinnville, all I can say is I wish the rest of this town's architecture, infrastructure and planning were of an equal design caliber to the PCC facility.

UC Riverside School of Medicine research buiding (photo by Lara Swimmer)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

This post marks the beginning of a new Portland Architecture continuing series, in which from time to time we will round up recent awards and honors bestowed upon the local design community.

First up is Portland firm SRG Partnership, which received a Special Mention for Sustainability in R&D Magazine’s 46th annual international Laboratory of the Year competition. Completed in 2011, the 60,000 square-foot, three-story facility is designed to achieve LEED Gold certification from the US Green Building Council.

Laboratories are some of architecture's biggest energy hogs, with heavy-duty ventilation systems and energy use, but the Riverside project is predicted to use 60 percent less energy then a facility designed to code, which also will save $500,000 per year in operational costs. The space is also full of natural light and natural materials like wood, both of which also are missing from most labs. Back when SRG won a merit award from AIA/Portland last fall for the lab, the jury called the project, "a strong concept that pulls from projects such as the Salk Institute," referring to Louis Kahn's masterpiece in La Jolla, California.

Meanwhile, Portland architect Hal Ayotte of Fletcher Farr Ayotte is the recipient of the University of Oregon’s 2012 George McMath Award. The awards ceremony will take place Wednesday, May 30 from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the UO in Portland White Stag Block at 70 NW Couch Street. Proceeds from ticket sales to the award luncheon ($50) will benefit financial aid programs for the university’s historic preservation students.

Ayotte's 40 years of professional practice include numerous renovations of historic landmarks, especially the National Park Service to the Oregon University System. Ayotte oversa projects like the reconstruction of Crater Lake Lodge, for example, winner of numerous local and regional American Institute of Architects design awards, as well as Mount Rainier National Park’s Paradise Inn, Multnomah Falls Lodge in the Columbia Corge, the Salem Passenger Rail Depot; the Marcus Whitman Hotel in Walla Walla, the State of Oregon Library in Salem, and the White Stag Block in Portland for the University of Oregon.

Also honored recently was Soderstrom Architects. The firm's design of the University of Portland bell tower received the Masonry & Ceramic Tile Institute’s Hammurabi Award for excellence in masonry. The Bell Tower, which sits beside a Pietro Belluschi-designed chuch, was designed by Dan Danielson of Soderstrom.

Bell Tower, University of Portland (image courtesy of the university)

“The jury found the level of craftsmanship to be outstanding,” wrote Randy Nishimura, one of three jurors for the Hammurabi Awards. “The integration of brick and precast concrete elements, and the application of the Flemish bond patterning are particularly successful. The texture, coursing, and brick patterns all complement one another in the service of creating a unified whole. The result is a complete, finished little jewel.”

The award was announced at a luncheon at Portland’s Governor Hotel on Thursday, March 1, 2012. Franz Hall, also designed by Soderstrom Architects, also received Hammurabi Award in 1997. The Bell Tower, dedicated in 2009, is the realization of a longtime vision by University benefactors and administrators to both showcase the University’s Catholic character and serve as a landmark symbol for the campus community.

In sustainability news, this year's BetterBricks Awards, honoring the region's innovative designers, builders and clients achieving high degrees of sustainability and energy efficiency, included an award in the Design-Engineer category for PAE Consulting Engineers' Steve Reidy, who had an inspiring message about how occupant comfort is an essential part of good design.

"We spend a lot of our lives as engineers – I do – talking about building metrics, building performance, goals," Reidy said. "But really the thing that inspires me is kind of maybe a little different as an engineer. I’m looking for, and I really excited about how a building feels. And everybody in this room will sit and say, ‘What does that mean?’ And it means something different for every person. Some person may think lighting is important, or space comfort. I spend a lot of time talking about temperature. It may be the size and shape of the room, it may be the architecture of the space, maybe the finishes and how a space looks. But the most important thing is, when you’re in a space that performs, when your project performs and you have occupants that go in there and say, ‘This space feels great,’ that’s when I’m inspired. That’s when I really feel that I’ve done the work I was meant to do, which is to bring those buildings forward and to put the occupants into those buildings. I think at that point they feel ignited. And I’m really excited when I go to my clients and feel that. That’s my excitement."

And finally tonight, Portland architect, Brian Cavanaugh has received a 2012 Young Architects Award from the American Institute of Architects. The award is given to individuals who have shown exceptional leadership and made significant contributions to the profession in an early stage of their architectural career. Most recently, his firm, Architecture Building Culture, received a 2011 AIA/Portland Design Award for the interior renovation of the Lubavitch Foundation of British Columbia headquarters in Vancouver.

“Brian possesses a sophisticated and creative mind coupled with a deep commitment to furthering the profession’s role in building rich and propelling communities through design excellence, advocacy, and proactive leadership,” the jury wrote in its comments for the Young Architects Award.

Every year for the past decade as I've covered the annual AIA/Portland Design Awards, the top prize, known as the Honor Award, has gone to one or two projects. This year, however, the jury felt far more generous. A record six projects walked away last Thursday night with the night's biggest accolade.

The winners of the Honor Award were: (1) the Legacy Emmanuel Medical Center Central Utility Plant in Northeast Portland, designed by ZGF Architects; (2) the Early Childhood Development Center in Gresham, designed by Mahlum; (3) the Tandem duplex in Southeast Portland, designed by Works Partnership Architecture, (4) J-Tea teahouse in Eugene, designed by Benjamin Waechter; (5) the Digital Animation Building and Campus in Glendale, California, by Lever Architecture; and (6) the Bud Clark Commons in Portland by Holst Architecture.

Many of these firms have been honored before, some numerous times. ZGF, for example, won last year's Honor Award for the Jaqua Center in Eugene, and has received the same prize in years past for projects like the Doernbecher Children's Hospital at OHSU. To be honest, though, winning for a hospital utility plant rather than, say, ZGF's much acclaimed Port of Portland headquarters, much have been a surprise even to the firm.

"A real achievement architecturally for such a banal program," the jury said of the Emanuel plant. "Expertly executed at every level from siding down to the detail. Subtle and evocative use of light that animates the building at night. There was a real inventiveness in the use of standardized industrial materials."

Works Partnership's Tandem project (photo by Brian Libby)

Works Partnership has won a slough of awards for its unbuilt work as well as for its B-side6 building. Of the Tandem project, which this blog covered in depth earlier this year, the jury was enamored with its "clear, strong concept," adding, "One move has a dramatic impact in a split level house type. Adventuresome use of materials for both exterior and interior. Wonderful interior detailing and use of perforated material. " Tandem also won this year's Mayor's Award for Design Excellence.

Holst, honored this year for the Bud Clark Commons, received a Merit Award last year last year for the Ziba World Headquarters, following awards in years past for projects like the Belmont Street Lofts and Clinton Condos.

Bud Clark Commons (photo by Brian Libby)

The jury said it was impressed "by the long and rigorous process by the architect, clients and community for this building type," applauding its "beautifully and cleverly composed elevation, using one window type to create a subtly dynamic façade." Overall, they said the project was "carefully executed at every level with a light hand," and called the courtyard "an ingenious working component of the building as both social and architectural transition space. Uplifting."

Honor Award winner Ben Waechter has only been practicing in Portland with his own firm for a few years (he previously worked for Allied Works locally as well as the Renzo Piano Building Workshop in Italy), yet by my count all three of his major projects have won AIA awards, given that J-Tea's two predecessors, the Cape Cod House and the Z-Haus, both received recognition last year. And J-Tea, like Z-Haus, was featured prominently in Dwell magazine. Waechter has to be considered on of the top up-and-coming architects in the city.

Ben Waechter's J-Tea (image courtesy Dwell magazine)

Of J-Tea, the jury commented in their traditional series of run-on sentences, "A dramatic transformation of a typical bungalow into residential and commercial space. Only four components each rendered beautifully. The canopy, the porch, the tea-walls and the tea-bar are all equally and carefully considered in relationship to the experience of tea. A nice set of transitions between the street and the interior of the tea-bar. The plainer quality of the assemblage makes it feel like you are walking through the layers of a painting. Lively and light with minimal means."

Mahlum, the Honor Award winner for Gresham's Early Child Development Center, won a Sustainability Award last year for Hayes Freedom High School in Camas, Washington; the firm, even after Rick Potestio's departure, has established itself as a venerable leader in building green schools.

Lever Architecture, the one firm out of the five Honor Award winners winning this year for the first time, has more experience than this fact might indicate. Principal Thomas Robinson spent six years at Allied Works, the city's most acclaimed firm, including on projects like the AIA award-winning University of Michigan Museum of Art. Before that, Robinson was a senior project architect for what may be the top architecture firm in the world, Herzog & de Meuron of Basel Switzerland, where he led the development of the innovative perforated copper façade and tower structure for the New De Young Museum in San Francisco.

"Fantastic transformation of a common industrial building," the jury wrote of Lever's Animation Building. "The projected benefited from careful tectonic analysis. There is a beautiful choreography of light and space, which manifests itself that is smart and clear and ready to be abused by the animation geeks. We also like the reuse of the recycled gym floor for the floors and walls."

This year's jury also awarded five second-tier Merit Awards to five projects: (1) the Two Story Four Square house in Boise by Heide Beebe and Doug Skidmore; (2) the School of Medicine Research Building at the University of California Riverside by SRG Partnership; (3) the Interchange residence in Portland by William Kaven Architecture; (4) Director Park in Portland by ZGF; and (5) BodyVox Dance Center in Portland by BOORA Architects.

Two Story Four Square in Boise (image courtesy Beebe Skidmore)

Of these winners, Beebe and Skidmore are the newest presence. They established their firm in 2007 and were honored this year for restoring and transforming a circa 1924 home prairie/craftsman-style home on the edge of a Boise historic district.

BOORA's win for BodyVox is seemingly well deserved, given how the firm restored an old industrial building on a low budget yet created a place with warmth, function and beauty. That said, it's a project that already competed in last year's AIA Design Awards. Such was also the case for projects like Tandem and J-Tea. This practice of allowing projects that don't win one year to compete again the next is a practice I'd like to see be discontinued.

Winning a Merit Award is a major validation, and the first AIA award, for William Kaven Architecture. The firm previously made its biggest plash as part of the 11 x Design Tour in 2009, which introduced many of the city's most talented young firms and architects such as Kaven, PATH Architecture, the now-defunct SEED Architecture Studio, Ben Waechter, Design Department, and Webster Wilson. Kaven's Interchange residence, located in the Overlook neighborhood of North Portland, is a gorgeous home oriented around a courtyard in the rear and showcasing the client's art collection.

William Kaven's Interchange Residence (photo by Brian Libby)

The third-tier Citation Award went to two projects: the Everett Community College Student Fitness Center in Everett, Washington, by SRG; and the James F. Miller Theater Complex at the University of Oregon in Eugene, designed by THA Architecture. SRG, as both of their awards this year indicates, has been a relatively frequent award winner over the years, and almost always for their educational facilities. THA winning an award is no shock; the firm has won countless AIA awards over time, such as an Honor Award for a new theater at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.

Two more special awards were given out. The Sustainaibilty Award went to Hennebery Eddy Architects for Portland Community College's new facility in Newberg, which is set to become the first net-zero energy educational building in Oregon, and the Craftsmanship Award went to a trio of architects - Randy Stegmeier, Ryan Yadan, and Jenn Ward - for the Quiet House, which the jury hailed for its "sublime" detailing and materials. Stegmeier works at ZGF and Ward at the very talented (but so far scarcely marketed) up-and-coming Firm 151.

Five project won unbuilt prizes. The Unbuilt Merit Award went to the Overton House in Portland by Works Partnership and the Bureau of Environmental Services' Columbia Boulevard Support Facility by Skylab Architecture. Both both firms have won many AIA awards over the years. One of the three Unbuilt Citation Awards was given to another new Portland firm, Architecture Building Culture, for the Lubavitch Center in Vancouver, British Columbia. Ben Waechter's Tower House was also honored, as was Works Partnership's North Mississippi Apartments.

Overall, the award winners overwhelmingly are comprised of two project types: residential and public buildings. With just a few exceptions such as J-Tea and the Digital Animation Building, almost every winner was either a house, multifamily housing, a health care facility, or an educational or government facility. Where is the private sector? If these awards are an accurate reflection of architectural quality, the corporate world of offices is laggging behind. Which is particularly amusing given that many in this demographic comprise the 1% controlling some 20-40% of the nation's wealth that Occupy protests around the nation are now addressing. Why are nonprofits, families and budget-strapped public sector entitites committing to quality design when they have fewer resources to do so?

Meanwhile, congratulations to all of this year's winning projects and architects.

Last night the trio of jurors presiding over this year's AIA/Portland Design Awards gave their annual Jury Critique presentation, beginning with a discussion of their own work and then moving on to observations about local architecture.

Although Merrill broke from tradition by only discussing one of her firm’s projects, an unbuilt cultural and popular music performance venue in Taiwan, Iwamoto and Kassabian both demonstrated a compelling array of projects from their respective portfolios.

Snøhetta's World Trade Center memorial in New York (image courtesy DesignWire)

In particular, Snøhetta’s emergence from an Oslo firm with no American built work to a major presence in New York and beyond was of interest. The firm opened its Manhattan office after receiving the coveted commission for the World Trade Center Pavilion, the only building occupying the site of the former twin towers. Then Snohetta benefited from a kind of happy accident. “Originally the intent was to open as a project office for the World Trade Center,” Kassabian explained. But after the project faced numerous delays, “In order to keep the office open we’ve taken on other work. Now we have 14 projects underway.” Among these are an art school building at Bowling Green University in Ohio, a library at North Carolina State University, and a major expansion of the landmark Mario Botta-designed San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Snøhetta proper has also designed acclaimed international projects like the Alexandria Library in Egypt.

Although her firm designs projects of all sizes from furniture prototypes to regional master planning, Iwamoto is an expert at digital fabrication and the author of a book called Digital Fabrications: Architectural and Material Techniques. “We look at the relationship of modularity and pattern to an overall surface,” she said. With training in both engineering and architecture, she has particularly explored how thin, light materials such as fabric and paper can be made to expand and contract, to be permeable and non-permeable depending on conditions and needs.

Although each year the out-of-town jury is hampered by a lack of time and experience seeing Portland, two of three had been to the city before. And they all had good things to say about local design.

“A lot of what we saw had exquisite craftsmanship,” Iwamoto said. “I was jealous coming from San Francisco: the budget here is often 200 a square foot, but the quality and material lushness for the budgets achieved is remarkable.”

“The architecture that’s coming out of Portland is very beautiful,” Kassabian added. “We have to commend you.”

If one attends the Jury Critique from year to year, it can be interesting to hear over time how different jurors from different cities arrive at similar conclusions. This jury, for example, noted (to put things in baseball terms) Portland ability to hit singles and doubles making up for its lack of home runs.

“At first there didn’t seem to be any super innovative project that popped out above the rest,” Iwamoto explained. “As we started digging more, the true innovation seemed to happen in the subtle innovations that made certain projects sing. It was more like a celebration of a natural material, or just doing enough and not going overboard. There were a tiny handful that were really experimenting with form.” The overall level of quality, the jurors agreed, was stellar, even if it wasn’t eye candy.

Most of all – and this of course is a common refrain from year to year – the trio was taken by how much wood they saw. “We were absolutely overwhelmed with the amount we saw at all scales,” Kassabian said, “from the structure to the interiors to the exteriors to the furniture.”

“In some cases wood takes on a language that is not unfamiliar but is beautifully done, the post and beam construction,” Iwamoto added. “Houses you start to expect to see more wood. But it started to become anything, we realized as we started looking through the portfolio. Even in the large institutional projects it was used selectively as a nice way of humanizing them. Do you guys all get together and swap your wood details? How do you know how to do all that?”

The jury’s next observation, however, was a politely delivered criticism. “I think the language of the projects followed a pretty modernist idiom, but there were only a tiny handful that were really experimenting with form,” Iwamoto said. At the time, the screen was displaying an exception to the rule: a house by Skylab Architecture. Although the jury never announces winners at the annual Critique Session, they did seem to display (in support of some of their positive comments) numerous projects by that firm as well as standout projects by Ben Waechter (the Tower House), Holst Architecture (Bud Clark Commons), BOORA (BodyVox dance studio), and ZGF (the Port of Portland headquarters).

The jury also had especially kind words for public buildings, such as the Bud Clark Commons and the renovation of Portland State University’s Lincoln Hall. “We were amazed by the integrity and the quality of publicly funded projects,” Iwamoto said. “We started to wonder what is going on here in terms of wise public officials shepherding projects through the system. There were a number of projects like that."

Bud Clark Commons (photo by Brian Libby)

Showing a photo of Clark Commons, Iwamoto applauded “the very clever means to create an animated and beautiful façade, in this case just turning some of them upside down and painting them different colors.” In the case of Lincoln Hall, Kassabian added, “This one we thought was interesting because of the historical building with a modern material. This was a pretty radical change from the before, and something we thought was extremely successful.”

At the end of the night, when the floor was opened to questions, one audience member asked, if wood is the default material here, what is it in the cities these jurors work in? “”In Atlanta? Artificial stucco,” Elam said, illiciting a laugh. “We don’t have anything as pervasive. There’s a lot of synthetics going on.”

“We see a lot of glass and metal in new york. Some of the older buildings, obviously brick, but not as nice as what’s here,” Kassabian answered.

“In San Francisco, we have a variety of materials: wood, stucco, metal, glass,” Iwamoto said. “What pervades is the general sense of, ‘Don’t touch anything.’ We love our Victorians, for example. You can’t mess with them. That’s a big thing for us to overcome.”

The notion of historic preservation as a barrier was a curious thought to end on, given how the jury had praised Portland for its tendency towards adaptive reuse. Yet Iwamoto wasn’t saying we should knock our best old buildings down. (Only a few outgoing City Council members and a smattering of baseball fans believe such things.) Rather, she seemed to be expressing the idea that architects naturally embrace the opportunity to dive in: to marry new architecture with old, to use wood for more than residential floors and cabinetry, to marry landscape and building more holistically, and to seek more boldness of form than the decorated box that is the norm not only in Portland but across design circles.

Perhaps it's fitting that Timberline Lodge is on top given its location, just below the snowy peak of Mt. Hood. The lodge, completed by the Works Progress Administration in 1937 from a design by Gilbert Stanley Underwood (an architect with the US Treasury Department), was the biggest vote-getter in AIA Oregon's survey of architects' 100 favorite buildings for the organization's centennial.

That Timberline would be honored now is interesting timing. Today, with the economy faltering like no time since the Great Depression, many have expressed frustration that the United States has not invested more in public works projects as FDR's administration did. Yet with projects like the Oregon Sustainability Center or restorations of local landmarks like Memorial Coliseum or Centennial Mills, Portland if not the federal government has sought to continue that tradition.

"Here, to Mount Hood, will come thousands and thousands of visitors in the coming years," President Franklin Roosevelt said in his dedication speech at Timberline. "Looking east toward eastern Oregon with its great livestock raising areas, these visitors are going to visualize the relationship between the cattle ranches and the summer ranges in the forests. Looking westward and northward toward Portland and the Columbia River, with their great lumber and other wood using industries, they will understand the part which National Forest timber will play in the support of this important element of northwestern prosperity. So, I take very great pleasure in dedicating this Lodge, not only as a new adjunct of our National Forests, but also as a place to play for generations of Americans in the days to come."

"One of the reasons people go to the building," architect Joachim Grube told Oregon Architect magazine this month, "is that it was conceived in very difficult economic times for the US, and it was kind of a symbol of survival for coming out of a dark time. That adds to the magic of the place."

Timberline also represents old-world craftsmanchip in a way that no other structure in Oregon can match. It is the only 20th century public building of its size that was constructed and furnished entirely by hand, including original craftwork in wood, wrought iron, weaving, applique painting, mosaic and stained glass.

Coming in at #2 on AIA Oregon's list was the Mount Angel Abbey Library, designed by the legendary Finnish architect Alvar Aalto and completed in 1970. This is one of only two buildings in the United States designed by Aalto, along with Baker House at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which coincidentally was completed in 1948, just three years before Portland architect Pietro Belluschi became dean of the architecture school at MIT. One of the world's most prestigious architecture prizes, the Alvar Aalto Medal, is named after him, as is a university in Helsinki. If Aalto is not in the top tier of 20th century modern architects alongside Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, and Le Corbusier, he's not far off.

The AIA chose Belluschi's Equitable Building at #3, honoring what has often been called the world's first modern office building; the circa-1947 Equitable was the first major structure in the world to be built with an aluminum and glass curtain wall (narrowly beating out the United Nations headquarters for that distinction). Yet history and innovation are not the only relevant factors, for the Equitable is also quite beautiful even today.

Another Belluschi design checks in at #4, with the Portland Art Museum. Built in 1932, this is among the earliest of Belluschi-designed landmarks and arguably put him on the map. And, as the oft-told legend goes, the architect convinced a skeptical museum to go ahead with his modern design rather than a faux-historic Georgian style they sought thanks to the help of Frank Lloyd Wrigt, who wrote museum trustees a letter of support for Bellusci's design.

When Belluschi left for MIT in 1951, the renowed Chicago/New York firm Skidmore, Owings Merrill took over his Portland office, creating a host of local landmarks still relevant today. Among these is the #5 selection, the US Bancorp Tower, better known as "Big Pink," which SOM designed in collaboration with Belluschi.

Big Pink and Pioneer Courthouse Square, the #6 entry, are the lone entries from the 1980s. This was a time when postmodern architecture briely flourished. Although the Michael Graves-designed Portland Building is an icon of that time, with its colorful facade of faux garlands, Courthouse Square takes on a more quiet, enduring style. Rather than an in-your-face irreverence to the architecture, turning historical forms into cartoons, the square's design by the late Portland architect Will Martin evokes classical history with its Greco-Roman-like columns, but never crosses the line into outright caricature. That's particularly appropriate given how Pioneer Courthouse Square has a sincere role to play as Portland's principal gathering place for political rallies, concerts, Christmas tree lightings and much more.

Central Library (photo by Brian Libby)

I would have thought Central Library, the #7 choice, might take top honors in the poll. Portlanders love their libraries (the city has at times had the most library card holders per capita of any large American city) , and this Georgian-styled beauty by A.E. Doyle was lovingly restored in 1997. The American Library Association also ranked Central as one of its top 10 libraries in the nation for architecture. Perhaps the fact that architects are voting made a difference, given how most favor modernism more than the general public. Yet if that's the case, choosing Timberline #1 wouldn't make much sense.

Gordon House, in its original location (photo by Brian Libby)

Frank Lloyd Wright's sole Oregon building, the Gordon House, makes the list of top Oregon architecture at #8. It isn't nearly as ambitious as Wright's most celebrated homes, such as Fallingwater. Yet it typifies his Usonian series of houses and the notion that quality modern architecture can be applicable to the lives of people living not only in cities, but on the prairies and in small towns. It's just too bad that the Gordon House, completed in 1964, had to be moved from its original location in Charbonneau along the Willamette River. The new location at the Oregon Garden near Silverton and the act that it's now open to the public give the Gordon House more opportunity to be seen now, but Wright's design was adapted specifically to its location, with one side framing views of the river and another oriented towards views of Mt. Hood. The couple that bought the Gordon House in 2000 had never heard of Frank Lloyd Wright. (Apparently they moved to Charbonneau from The Moon.) They bought the Gordon only in hopes of tearing it down. Yeah, and I buy Picasso paintings so I can fingerpaint over the canvas.

Memorial Coliseum under construciton in 1960 (image courtesy City of Portland archives)

Luckily the #9 entry on the list, Memorial Coliseum, is still standing. Faced with demolition in 2009, the building is now set to be restored in 2012. During the fight to save the Coliseum, those with vested interests in building a baseball stadium on the site (thereby allowing PGE Park to be converted to soccer) tried to pigeonhole the building as simply a decaying eyesore - typified by the "ugly Costco" comment made by Commissioner Randy Leonard. Now, the decision by Mayor Sam Adams and others to save Memorial Coliseum is being validated by its placement on this list. Can you imagine the uproar if someone tried to tear down Timberline Lodge, or Central Library? Each era has its icons, and the Coliseum represents the very best of modernist architecture of the mid-20th century. Then again, though, I'm biased: the Coliseum is my favorite building in the city, and was a cause worthfighting for.

Watzek House (photo by Brian Libby)

Rounding out the list at #10, the John Yeon-designed Watzek House has had a good year in 2011 after earlier this year topping Portland Monthly's list of the top local houses, and also opening to public tours for the first time. Yeon was too much of a wanderer to pursue architectural fame like the better known Pietro Belluschi. But there's no denying that his talent was just as great. The Watzek is part Bauhaus, part farmhouse, with hints of Japanese and Scandinavian design. It doesn't grab you by the lapels with its greatness like Wright's Fallingwater, the sole other house to be added early to the National Register and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. But it charted a new way forward and veritably gave birth to Northwest Modern architecture of the midcentury, a style still celebrated today for its simple elegance.

The AIA Oregon website has not only the top 10 buildings list, but a full top 100. I was curious to see what else made the list, especially because there are no projects from the list built before 1984. If one project from more recent times was going to be included, I'd have voted for Allied Works' Wieden + Kennedy headquarters. In terms of other ommissions, I of course being an Oregon Ducks fanatic (and historian) would have also voted for Autzen Stadium. Actually, though, the highest ranking building from recent times is 12 West, designed by ZGF. Somewhat appropriately, it #12.

But enough about my selections, or the AIA's. What would you add to the list? These rankings are only fun if they prompt a conversation.

This Thursday, September 29 brings the return of the Architecture + Design Fest, presented by the Portland chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the AIA in Portland, the A+D Fest brings a variety of events and happenings.

As I write this, the festivities are set to begin in just a few hours with the Opening Night Party (6:30PM, AIA Center For Architecture, NW 11th & Flanders), with a a glimpse of the month’s myriad events and activities. The Center for Architecture will be converted to a lounge complete with music, specialty cocktails, and local organic hors d’ouevres.

The party is also a kickoff for this month's AIA Oregon 100th anniversary exhibit. The exhibition explores the impact architects and architecture have had on the State of Oregon, its regions, and cities through the century. Some of the most beloved buildings in the state will be featured as well as issues facing our community, such as sustainability and land-use which architects have made a significant contribution.

Tours

Leedy House (image courtesy AIA/Portland)

The first big event after tonight's party and exhibit opening is "Design Matters: A Tour of Exceptional Portland Homes". A rare opportunity for guests to glimpse inside six sensational Portland residences, the tour includes the Leedy House by architect Paul McKean, who won top honors at the 2009 AIA/Portland Design Awards; the NW Raleigh House by Giulietti/Schouten, which thoughtfully re-imagines a 1970s ranch house; the Belluschi House (formerly known as the Burkes House) by legendary architect Pietro Belluschi and renovated by his son, Anthony Belluschi; the Cape Cod House (previously featured in Portland Architecture) by Ben Wechter; the Ankeny Lofts by COLAB; and the Tingley-Fortin House, designed by owners Ellen Fortin and BOORA's Michael Tingley.

I've visited the Belluschi House, the Tingley-Fortin House, and the Cape Cod House, and I've followed the work of the other three architects for years. And all are superb designs with superior craftsmanship. This isn't just a homes tour: it really is an example of the best residential design in Portland.

Are you a lover of midcentury and ranch houses? Next Saturday (October 8) brings the Reedwood Neighborhood Walking Tour, in southeast Portland just north of the Reed College campus. Dating to 1955, Reedwood is an eclectic mix of well-designed and built mid-century homes, providing a suburban feel to a neighborhood that is within 10 minutes of downtown Portland. The neighborhood also faces an uncertain future as local zoning regulations have created the potential to dramatically change the landscape of Reedwood predominately through infill. The Reedwood Neighborhood Walking Tour is presented by DOCOMOMO, a national nonprofit dedicated to documenting and conserving buildings and neighborhoods of the modern movement (from which its acronym is derived), and Portland's Architectural Heritage Center. ($15 general, $10 for AHC members).

Award Programs

Interested in landscape architecture? As if the homes tour and the art exhibit on Saturday weren't enough, there is also the ASLA Design Soiree (6PM, Tiffany Center, 1410 SW Morrison Street, $65), in which the local American Institute of Landscape Architects celebrates professional and student excellence by recognizing the firms, individuals, and agencies responsible for outstanding works of landscape architecture and environmental planning that promote an enhanced quality of life in Oregon and beyond.

The centerpiece of the Architecture + Design Festival, now in its third year (though its predecessor, Architecture Week, ran for many years prior), is the annual AIA/Portland Design Awards program. This year's awards have been combined with a 100th anniversary party for AIA Oregon; the event, called The Party of the Century Gala, is scheduled for the Portland Art Museum (1219 SW Park Avenue, $35). Last year the sole winner of the top prize, the Honor Award, was ZGF Architects' design of the Jaqua Center at the University of Oregon. Who will claim it this year?

As per tradition, the night before the awards brings An Evening With The Jury (5:30PM, Center For Architecture, $5), a discussion by the trio of out-of-town jurors about their own work as well as their overall impressions with the city. This year's jury includes Merrill Elam of Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects in Atlanta, Hilary Sample of MOS Architects in New York, and Vanessa Kassabian of Norwegian firm Snøhetta’s New York office.

On October 21 is the Young Designers Award program (7PM, Center For Architecure, NW 11th & Flanders). "As chair of the A+D festival, one of my major hopes was to try and engage a broader base of designers – multi-discipline - in Portland and to also reach out to the younger architectural generation," Carrie Strickland of Works Partnership said by email. "I think that the AIA does a fantastic job of supporting and promoting established architecture firm and individuals with its collection of services and with the annual design awards program, but it is also imperative to acknowledge the young designers that find their place in the profession – those dedicated to finding outlets for their ideas in their formative years. Young designers come out of school and, if they’re lucky, find employment at firms working within teams. Much of the focus shifts from creative and analytical processes to building technical competency. This award is hoping to encourage emerging designers to continue to explore their own ideas."

"Young architects and designers have it tough right now," Strickland adds. "We all do. Emerging professionals in a tight job market need to compete on a different level and find ways to set themselves apart from their peers. I know that when we look at applicant for interns we are careful to look at how well they can express their ideas. The trend now is to rely on digital technology to tell your story – but young people need to make sure they are developing skills to express concepts and ideas that can carry water and not just seduce with imagery. Being able to sketch an idea on a napkin as a means of communicating your concept versus rendering something for 2 days in whatever 3D modeling program is the current rage and be a game changer for someone hoping to establish themselves."

Film Screenings & Art Exhibits

Beginning this Saturday (October 1) at 6PM at the Bside6 Gallery (524 East Burnside) is an exhibit called "Body Building," curated by Christine Taylor and Jeff Jahn. A look at how architecture houses the body, the exhibition is based on the concept of housing the body using form, structure, fashion and video. The exhibit portrays how fashion and architecture intertwine as a complex organism, shaping how we visualize our world and the spaces we inhabit.

The Architecture + Design Fest also includes several curated film screenings, the first coming next Tuesday (October 4) with a selection of short films by...me! It seems strange to describe my own work, but the films in "Film Shorts by Brian Libby" (6PM, Center For Architecture, NW 11th & Flanders) are about three to seven minutes each and are basically a succession of experimental travelogues. Marc Mohan of The Oregonian writes, "Brian Libby's films manage to meld the quotidian and the sublime, or rather perhaps expose the one within the other.” Whether it’s pigeons flocking around a local Portland dairy, a double-decker bus ride in London, the canals of Amsterdam and Copenhagen or the freeways of Los Angeles, the intent is to view urban and natural settings with a quiet sense of wonder. The show was curated by Thomas Philippson of the Northwest Film Center.

Another film screening comes the following Tuesday, October 11, curated by local nonprofit The Cinema Project. "Building A Home in the 1970s" (6PM, Center For Architecture, free) features films by Videofreex, Richard Brick and Rudolph Burkhardt documenting some of the counter-cultural movements that challenged notions of community and home and promoted alternatives to the very physical structures in which communal activity could take place. The black-and-white videos serve both as do-it-yourself guides to alternative structures (like geodesic domes and “inflatables”) and documents of the artists, their friends, and families who participate both as builders and inhabitants.

A third screening night, "Deep Urban Space", comes Tuesday, October 18 (also 6PM at the Center For Architecture, with free admission) curated by Michael Neault, a writer, researcher, and media arts programmer with Second Story Interactive Studios. One film, called "Lost Buildings" by Chris Ware and "This American Life" host Ira Glass, is about the evolution of one boy’s obsession with Chicago’s disappearing architectural heritage and the friends he makes along the way. With inventive animations by Chris Ware, it offers a more intimate perspective on Chicago’s buildings. Also showing is "My Playground," a documentary pursuing roving teams of parkour athletes as they infiltrate the urban arena.

Lectures

Next Wednesday, in a talk called "Modular Making in the Age of Digital Craft" (7PM, Oregon College of Art and Craft, 8245 Southwest Barnes Road, free admission), Mark and Peter Anderson of Anderson Architecture, a design and contraction firm integrating the fields of art, architecture, and construction will present their ideas and approach to design/build. The event also includes tours of the new Vollum Drawing, Painting and Photography Building and the Bonnie-Laing Malcolmson Thesis Studios designed by Charles Rose Architects of Boston in collaboration with COLAB Architecture + Urban Design of Portland from 7-7:30. The presentation will occur from 7:30-8:30 in the Vollum Building Painting and Drawing Studios.

In conjunction with the Architecture + Design Fest, Portland State University's architecture department is inaugurating a new lecture series called "Firsts". On October 7 comes Petra Kempf, a New York architect and urban designer who founded URBANTRANSITS, an interdisciplinary research initiative focusing on the transient nature of cities. She has worked with the Department of City Planning in New York City, the Project for Public Spaces and Richard Meier and Partners. Later in the month, on October 27 comes John Ochsendorf, an engineer and educator specializing in the history and technology of historic structures. Ochsendorf is the first engineer to be awarded a Rome Prize (2007) and the first structural engineer to be awards a MacArthur Fellowship (2008). He currently teaches architecture and civil and environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

One day he's a Portland kid delivering newspapers and the next, a few decades later, he's being recognized by President Obama as a leading example of serving his community. The recipe for his success? "If you’re benevolent and kind, it pays back," Jerry Lee said in a recent phone interview.

MulvannyG2 Architecture’s Seattle-based Chairman of the Board, Lee received a 2011 Gold Level Presidential Volunteer Service Award presented by the President's Council on Service and Civic Participation. “Your volunteer service demonstrates the kind of commitment to your community that moves America a step closer to its great promise,” Obama stated in his congratulatory letter to Lee.

Lee, who originally hails from Portland and studied at the University of Oregon, has logged more than 500 hours of community service in the last 12 months alone. He is a member of Seattle Children’s Hospital Foundation’s “Circle of Care” and as a board member of the College Success Foundation. He is a board member for Susan G. Komen for the Cure, The Martinez Foundation, and the Bellevue Arts Museum. Lee also actively supports the Seattle Art Museum and Communities in Schools/Seattle, as well as Kin On Community Health Care and Nikkei Concerns, both elderly care facilities serving the Pacific Northwest.

Lee says his father first taught him the value of generosity. "We lived at Second and Yamhill and my dad had a grocery store there for 35 years," he recalls. "It was basically full of pensioners. I remember my mother getting upset at my father at all the IOUs in the register. Dad pretty much fronted the bill until their Social Security checks came. When hungry people came in, dad gave them food to eat. Sometimes at our dinner table there were transients. In the 35 years they had their business, they never were robbed once. There was no graffiti. I’ve always felt that dad’s goodwill was a kind of halo that was protected around the store. I think that kind of philosophy was what I took in the business world."

Rendering of Gashora Girls Academy site plan

Mulvanny G2, for which Lee has worked for more than 35 years, has designed numerous pro-bono projects over the years. The latest example is the Gashora Girls Academy in Rwanda, which opened in February. An upper-secondary boarding school for 270 girls, In addition to offering high quality college-prep academics, the Gashora Girls Academy is focused on eliminating the impediments that exist to girls receiving an education. They are provided nutritious meals, mental and emotional support, access to healthcare, and a supportive learning environment with optimal conditions for assuring their future success. The 30-acre campus overlooks Lake Milayi and includes student dormitories, a dining hall with attached kitchen, science and technology labs, an art/mixed media center, and sports fields.

So what made Lee want to become an architect? Why was design the route to carrying on the benevolence he saw in his father?

"When I was a kid down at Shattuck school, I had a friend, an immigrant from Hong Kong. We hung out a lot together, but he never invited me to his home," Lee remembers. "In the seventh grade I finally went over there, to a place at Second and Alder. On the second floor there was this big floor space, and all these immigrants had plywood sheets that they lived on temporarily maybe 10 by 12 feet. My friend and his sister and mother and father lived there. I was just appalled. I came back and told my mom, 'I want to become an architect and design homes for immigrant housing when I grow up.' That’s what started my path."

When Lee first started at Mulvanny as a draftsman in the 1980s, "I ran the blueprint machine and swept the floors, at the bottom of the totem pole," he recalls. Today, as a head of the firm, he is far from a top-down leader. He says his Asian heritage, viewed through his parents' example, was about hard work as well as family. "We’ve always blended our culture with our business practice," he explains. "Finance and profits are all good, but I think we take a different philosophy: that if you do the job right, profits are a byproduct."

That starts with a happily company family. "We have breakfast every Friday morning together. I think it’s important we break bread together with our co-workers. You’re never going to sit with the same guy every Friday. We try to make them like ‘Family Feud’ or ‘Hollywood Squares’ or ‘Survivor’. We’ve even taught the Macarena and had lessens in setting places at the table. We try to get together for bowling, or a ball game. It’s important to involve the family, including spouses. I think because of it we have a tendency to work together. The Chinese philosophy says if you put a bundle of sticks together you can’t break it like you could just one stick. Together we can make mountains move."

Redmond City Hall (image courtesy Public Art 4 Culture)

Still, Jerry Lee seems to be an extra big stick. Or, to mix metaphors with help from Reggie Jackson, Lee may be the straw that stirs the drink. Certainly there are projects for which he holds pride as an architect. In our conversation, Lee cited projects like Redmond City Hall, and talked about how the firm has expanded continually over the years, including an office in his hometown that has designed a number of award-winning projects.

Yet it always comes back to his giving spirit - not just a convenient giving, but one with true force and meaning. Consider a final story from Lee:

“I had an Ichiro signed baseball bat I got in 2001, which I loved. But my dad says if you give something to charity, it should be something you treasure, not just something you’re looking to get rid of. So I donated it to Komen Foundation for an auction fundraiser. It raised $1,000. Not long after that, a friend of mine gave me a birthday present. It was a signed jersey from Wayne Gretzky, the world’s greatest hockey player. He wanted to give something back that was as good as the Ichiro bat. But the year after I donated that jersey to Komen and it raised $10,000. USA Today was part of the sponsorship campaign that year, and they printed a picture of the jersey. Six months later I got this big box in the mail, and it was a signed jersey and a letter from Wayne Gretzky saying, you can’t give this one away.’”

The Partner University Fund, an initiative of the French Embassy of the US to promote innovative collaborations in research and education between French and American universities, has selected for funding a proposed three-year partnership between Portland State University's Department of Architecture and the Ecole Speciale d’Architecture de Paris.

The $485,000 grant will allow the two schools to collaboratively design and build two orphanages in Haiti during the first two years of the partnership. The third year of the partnership will feature a cultural and educational exchange in which Portland State University architecture and engineering students will study at the Ecole in Paris and the Parisian students will come to Portland, involving approximately 140 students.

Haiti was chosen as the focus of the collaboration because of the need for rebuilding in the earthquake-ravaged country, and both programs will bring unique strengths and specialties that are expected to complement each other: the Ecole Special d’Architecture de Paris specializes in emergency architecture, and the Department of Architecture of Portland State University focuses on field work and community engagement.

The Ecole Speciale d'Architecture was founded in 1865 by engineer Emile Trélat as reaction against the educational monopoly of Beaux-Arts architecture. Since its beginning, the school has included innovative courses such as domestic hygiene and urban public health. It was officially recognized as providing "public utility" in 1870, and recognized by the state as an institution of higher education in 1934. Notable students and staff have included Robert Mallet-Stevens, who was with Le Corbusier widely regarded as the most influential figure in French architecture in the period between the two World Wars; Farah Pahlavi, wife of the former Shaw of Iran; and August Perret, whose post-WWII reconstruction of Le Havre in Paris was declared by UNESCO one of the World Heritage Sites.

On the PSU side, the initiative continues the work of professor Sergio Palleroni, who previously was awarded the American Institute of Architects 2011 Latrobe Prize for a research proposal looking into the role architects play in public interest projects.

“This is a wonderful recognition of Sergio's initiatives and the enthusiasm he has brought to the outreach efforts that distinguish the architecture program at PSU," John Blumthal, principal at Yost Grube Hall architects and a board member for Architects without Borders. "I believe the student experiences made possible by this grant will influence the life-long direction of professional careers and provide these prospective architects a global perspective for their work that they would not gain in any other way.”

"This project has Sergio's name written all over it: the innovative design of the curriculum to meet a tremendous and urgent need, the dense cultural and design experience afforded to the students, and an implicit trust in everyone involved," said Megan McMorran, Director of Programming/Operations, Action Center at Mercy Corps.

The award, and Palleroni's continuing efforts, also indicate a broader identity in design and art for which Portland State University is distinguishing itself. PSU professor and acclaimed artist Harrell Fletcher has quickly upped the reputation of the school's art department through his focus on art as social practice: not just making objects or installations in galleries or public spaces, but using art and artful thinking to stimulate conversations and highlight a wide spectrum of social needs. It's an ideal fit for Portland, where we lack a sizable old-money class to invest in art and design, but have carved out a different kind of currency through connections and social awareness.

What's more, the partnership between PSU's architecture department, a decade ago fighting for its very right to exist, and a prestigious institution like the Ecole Speciale d’Architecture de Paris will only enhance the reputation of this university, which is now evolving from a middling commuter school to an urban university at the forefront of a worldwide conversation about design, art and the roles they play.

Continuing our look at Portland Monthly magazine's list of the top 10 local houses of all time (begun in Monday's post), compiled for the April issue, we find what may be the largest house of the group.

The 6th-ranked M. Lloyd Frank Estate was completed in 1924 and is located on the Lewis & Clark campus, which took over the property in 1942 (it now houses the president's administrative offices). The house was designed by Herman Brookman for the heir to the Meier & Frank department store fortune and, as Randy Gragg writes, it is a "merging of graceful period architecture and breathtaking landscape design," as well as a "classic pre-Depression mash-up of opulence and stylistic eclecticism."

M. Lloyd Frank Estate (image courtesy tug@lclark.edu)

Among the highlights of the M. Lloyd Frank are its hanging stairwell and its brickwork, the latter of which was composed to make the house appear to have been built over multiple eras. Yet it may be the landscaping that truly makes the property stand out. "The Frank Estate," Gragg adds, "is ultimately about the experience of space, drawing you through a compression of intimate rooms and expansive grand halls to the crescendo of an eight-acre formal garden framing a view of Mt. Hood."

Still, the faux-rustic brick work? That to me is architecture trying to be something it's not. If the house was built in one swift stroke, there's nothing that ought to compel a builder or architect to try and indicate otherwise. Why build all that opulence and grandness and then, in effect, apologize for it?

Another grand mansion, the Cobb House from 1917, makes the list at #7. As a jury, we felt that a building by A.E. Doyle practically had to be included. It's not to say the Cobb was chosen because Doyle was the designer, but given his role in building early-20th Century Portland, it was a pleasure to find one of his houses worthy of inclusion.

"Arguably no Portland architect shaped early Portland so widely as Albert E. Doyle, who designed much of the city's emerging financial district; our trademark white terra-cotta buildings such as the Meier & Frank Building and Lipman's (now Hotel Monaco); the earliest buildings of Reed College; and our most-visited civic building, the Multnomah County Central Library."

The Cobb House earns accolades for how it unites indoor and outdoor spaces on a steep site, especially the rounded breakfast room overlooking the gardens. It's in the Jacobethan style, which, as juror William Hawkins notes in his book Classic Houses of Portland: 1850-1950, was popular a the time around the country for lavish estates and summer homes.

"In Portland, Doyle's Cobbs mansion incorporated the best of select details within a masterfully balanced framework of gable-ended forms," Hawkins writes. "The lavishly appointed house is of masonry construction (mostly brick with dressed-stone trim) and incorporates appropriate Classical details, which define it as Jacobethan. Tudor elements are also found in the house, with half-timbering in the garden room extension and rough-cast stocco work on the engaged tower and kitchen/garage wing." Jacobethan style died a quick death in America with the oncoming of the Great Depression - perhaps not unlike what the Great Recession did to local condo towers.

"The entire ensemble," Hawkins concludes, "including the circular drive at the entrance court, the gabled entry with its oriel windows, and the balustrated gardens, make the Cobbs House one of Portland's most exceptionally designed homes." Needless to say, this was one that Hawkins the juror strongly advocated.

Saul Zaik House (photos by Brian Libby)

The #8 entry on Portland Monthly's houses list is one I had the good fortune to spend some time in: architect Saul Zaik's own home on NW Saint Helens Avenue. In talking with Zaik for a 2009 profile, he described the way he he and early Portland modernists like Belluschi, Yeon, Van Evera Bailey and Walter Gordon "were into a lot of big roofs and adaptation to site. William Fletcher, by comparison was always trying to do international architecture and build it out of wood," Zaik explained. "But Square boxes with cedar siding and no overhangs require a lot of maintenance."

Belluschi and Yeon helped show Zaik's generation that followed what the Northwest modern style could and maybe should be. "The work we liked to do came right out of our time at University of Oregon: that sheltering aspect. It was done around Eugene by Jim Morton, Bruce Chase, Denorval Unthank. But how many times would I drive clients around the Watzek house? There was also the Sutor house across the street, and the other one up the street Yeon did. We were ooing and aahing."

At heart, Randy Gragg writes in the Portland Monthly article accompanying the houses list, "Zaik relishes interpreting warm, clean forms of modernism for the Northwest landscape in the mlocal material of wood - and in this pursuit, the home he designed for his family stands as the finest example. The house is really a series of three separate pavilions - living spaces, bedrooms, and the carport - all connected by bridges and pathways. Each room is little more than columns, beams, and planes of glass-and-wood paneling. As simple as a Native American longhouse, but as delicate as a leaf, Zaik's home seems to almost hover above its wooded, hillside site."

The 9th-ranked house on the list represents the prairie style that was popularized by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright but never saw a boom in the Northwest. The Maegley House, completed in 1914 from a design by John Virginius Bennes. Although he also designed Portland's landmark Hollywood Theater and many buildings in Corvallis for Oregon State University, the architect was a Chicago native, explaining the Sullivan/Wright influence.

But it's not simply strict prairie style, for the Maegley has a Meditterranean tile roof, molded stucco and bay windows. Inside, each of the major public rooms are connected directly to each other and to the outdoors. This is a kind of modernism forerunner, exhibiting the simplicity of detailing and inside-out consideration that would inform generations of contemporary homes. For that reason, prairie style has also, as Gragg notes, become popular with today's era of faux-historic McMansions.

Rockwood House (photo by Richard Strode)

The #10 house on the list was the biggest surprise for yours truly. I've been covering architecture in Portland for over a decade, but am somewhat embarrassed to say I was not familiar with the Rockwood House until Randy Gragg suggested it to the rest of the jury. But now I want to become the Rockwoods' pro-bono housesitter.

We'd decided to include a house from the past 30 years on the list, and had been considering two recent houses in North Portland, PATH Architecture's Park Box and Atelier Waechter's Z Haus, as well as the Hoke Residence by Skylab Architecture. Yet the Rockwood House, which architect and professor David Rockwood designed for his parents at a site on the north shore of Hayden Island, was irresistibly magnificent.

Rockwood House (photo by Richard Stode)

"Rockwood's design channels Yeon's uncompromising craftsmanship by way of the celebrated prefab aesthetic of Charles and Ray Eames," Gragg writes. "Standing as commandingly as a Venetian palazzo on the Columbia River, the Rockwood House features an exposed stell structural system based on a near-perfect 11-foot, 6-inch grid. Panels of lightweight pumice concrete sandwiching foam insulation (a system Rockwood invented well before "sustainable" wall panels became mainstream) attach to the steel grid to form the exterior walls and roof." The house, Gragg adds, "creates the peaceful sense of floating in some much larger whole with every view and space framed by the grid."

Each of the jurors also selected a series of honorable-mention selections, and I will feature those in a post to follow.

The American Institute of Architects has named Sergio Palleroni, professor of architecture at Portland State University, and three of his colleagues from across the country as the recipients of AIA’s 2011 Latrobe Prize. Palleroni and his colleagues won for their research proposal looking into the role architects play – and could play in the future – in public interest projects. Palleroni is Professor and Fellow of the new Center for Sustainable Processes and Practices at Portland State.

The prize includes $100,000 in research funding for the team, which in addition to Palleroni, includes Bryan Bell, executive director of Design Corps; Roberta Feldman, professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago; and David Perkes, AIA, director of Gulf Coast Community Design Studio at Mississippi State University. Theirs was one of nearly 500 proposals considered for the prize, which is given every two years.

Recently I spoke by phone with Palleroni about the prize and his approach to studying the profession. Originally from southern Argentina, Palleroni previously taught at the University of Texas, Austin and the University of Washington for 18 years. He is the founder of the Basic Initiative, a multidisciplinary fieldwork program which each year challenges students from US and schools worldwide into apply their education in the field in service of the problems facing marginalized communities throughout the world.

Palleroni has concentrated since the 1970s on issues of housing and community development in the developing world, working with organizations such as the United Nations, World Bank, and the governments of Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Nicaragua, India and Taiwan. He received a bachelor of architecture degree from the University of Oregon and a graduate degree in research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "I was interested in how different cultures negotiated in places like cities," he explained, "and how you get people to co-exist." Some cultures such as Japan and Korea, for example, have adjusted well to dense city life, while other cultures have been mired in corruption and inequity.

The research done as a result of the LaTrobe Prize will explore how the architecture profession can get more involved in issues like planning, transportation, and housing, from which Palleroni says (accurately so) architects have been too marginalized.

"I think we’ve taken ourselves out of the debate of where society should be headed and the things that should be happening. We’re involved with so little that happens worldwide. It’s a tiny fraction of what gets built that comes from architects. In housing, for example, it's only about five to eight percent of housing. We wondered: why is that? Everybody’s been quoting that figure yet nobody knows where it comes from. What percentages are we really talking about, and what portions should we be accessing?"

It's not all bad news or a matter of uninvolved architects. The burgeoning importance of sustainability and cutting carbon to reduce greenhouse gases has brought architecture to the forefront of the conversation. What's more, Palleroni says Portland architects generally have a greater level of involvement in these and other public-interest issues than designers in other cities.

"Twenty years ago, you’d be branded as an idealist or off your rocker [for preaching environmental architecture]. But at least now people are saying these are important issues. Things are changing. What we’re hoping to do is look at how people are taking this on and use it as an opportunity to reimagine what the profession is doing and what these new models are. We hope we can make a guide for the profession of an alternative path, a theater of operation for architecture."

"What we’re planning to do is conduct some national surveys to see how involved architects are right now in these kinds of larger ideas," Palleroni explains. "Bryan Bell is leading that. We’re going to take that and try to create a baseline to see what the profession is interested in and second what it is involved in. then we’’ interview these models and try to understand them well enough to describe them back to the profession as well."

Palleroni specifically points to how metropolitan areas, even progressive Portland's, develop mostly on their suburban fringes without much restriction on what gets built. "We can’t just let these decisions trickle down to the guy with the pickup truck in the suburbs building houses," he added. "We have to be in there making sure the houses are truly sustainable. It can’t be a generic McMansion, but housse designed for place."

"It seems like we’re denying ourselves some of the most interesting things about America. To me it seems like, just from a selfish point of view, I want to be involved in those big questions. It’s an opportunity to be involved in the kinds of things we were involved in school. Too often we end up being pedestrian about our ambitions. People say nobody pays us to be idealistic."

Interestingly, when Portland State initially sent out a press release to several local media members last week about the LaTrobe Prize, one local conservative website editor responded to all of us with a diatribe about socialist architecture. He wrote of "socialist architects" and a "barrage of propaganda from your Oregon public education and 'modern' university education."

"We have seen the photos of the people leaping from the upper floors of Chinese mass housing adjacent to factories which are urban versions of communist agricultural communes," Leonard writes, "and so are aware of the human cost that comes with the influences of state industrial 'capitalism.'"

"Modern (in a purely time sense) architecture emanating from somebody who has a degree from Harvard and now teaches the profession at a California university, is to us immediately suspect. 'Green' to Progressives, means political efficiency, not intentional technological or environmental efficiency. A socialist does not care about the cost per kwh, or how the design suppresses the soul. Serfs do not have souls."

Advertisement for one of Palleroni's lecture last year

One can only laugh off the critique of modern architecture, but I asked Palleroni about the more serious notion that architectural planning takes away freedoms.

"Why would we deny architecture being involved in all kinds of issues? I've practiced in Latin America, Asia and Europe. A lot of these places are out-competing us in the capitalist world," Palleroni said. "And in those places, architects are involved in a lot more. Developers are seeing the value of having architects involved. Some of the best public debates about the city as a whole are places like Taipei. I think if there’s a problem America faces it’s that we’ve gotten ourselves into a series of prescribed roles which are not necessarily flexible to face the issues of today or the future."

"I’m not arguing you take away an individual’s right to build what they want, but we need restrictions," Palleroni reasons. "I want a big house with bells and whistles too. But there are so many ways you can cut the pie up. The challenge now for architecture is how we make people happy and give clients what they want in their building, but also be responsible to the practice. The world just doesn’t have enough resources to do everything. We’ve been living with a kind of no-limits mentality. The average American house since World War II has gone from 250 square feet per captia to 1000 square feet. The average house has gone from 1000 to 2500 square feet, with fewer people living in them. Not everybody’s going to get what they want, but you can actually have some pretty cool houses without consuming everything. That’s where ingenuity is involved. That’s where an architect can get involved and help a client get all the fun stuff you wanted in maybe half that size. If that’s socialism, I’m totally for it."

For an upcoming issue in 2011, Portland Monthly magazine and its editor, former Oregonian architecture critic Randy Gragg, are planning to compose a list of the top 10 houses of the 20th century in Portland.

When I heard about the list, the first house that came to mind was the Watzek House, designed by the great John Yeon.

Watzek House (image courtesy University of Oregon)

In 1935, Portland lumber magnate Aubrey Watzek looked to build a house for himself and his mother, with his friend Yeon getting the job. But Watzek initially did not like the modern, non-traditional design. Instead of trying to change his mind, Yeon suggested Watzek contact Pietro Belluschi, who was then directing the AE Doyle architectural firm, the city's most accomplished at that time. But Belluschi’s design didn't impress Watzek either, so he returned to Yeon's original proposal.

Which was a good thing, because even if the design wasn't initially to the lumber baron's taste, the house would turn out an influential masterpiece of early American modernism. And all this from an architect who was just 26 years old when he finished the construction drawings in early 1937.

As Leland Roth writes in the book American Architecture, Yeon "decided to create a thoroughly modern residence, but one designed in response to the local climate rather than adhering to abstract international formulas, and he decided to exploit wood as a building material rather than steel or concrete," which had been de rigeur in most all other iterations of early 20th century modernism, a la Frank Lloyd Wright or the Bauhaus.

Watzek House (images courtesy University of Oregon)

"The result," Roth continues, "was a clustering of rooms around a central court," drawing from Asian and early ranch styles, "with low pitched roofs carried on wood supports protecting the large expanses of glass from winter rains. The house was featured in several exhibitions and publications produced by the Museum of Modern Art."

After the Watzek, John Yeon only pursued architecture in fits and starts, producing a few other houses and the Portland Oregon Visitors Center that still stands in Waterfront Park. But he largely turned to regional planning and landscape preservation, while Yeon's contemporary, Pietro Belluschi, aggressively pursued his career and went on to become a far bigger name in international architectural history.

Belluschi ought to have a few houses up for consideration on the list as well, not just because he is Portland's most acclaimed architect in history but because a couple of the houses are magnificent. Two years ago I had the good fortune to visit the circa-1948 Burkes House, where Belluschi's own family lived for many years.

Belluschi's Burkes House (photo by Brian Libby)

As Meredith Clausen writes of the Burkes in her book, Pietro Belluschi, the project "was long in gestation. The clients just before the war had decided to sell their old colonial house and build a new one; aware of the fame of the recently completed De Graaff house by the celebrated Los Angeles architect Richard Neutra in the hills south west of Portland, they decided that theirs too should be modern. The house was designed like his others to take advantage of the view while preserving privacy. facing outwards to the expansive view of the city on one side, it opened out to a secluded garden notched out of the hillside on the other. The living and dining areas were combined into one long continuous space paralelling the view, with a kitchen area set off to one side by a large brick masonry core."

"The sense of an open expansive space was enhanced by continuous cork floors throughout," Clausen adds, "and by the lush boards of the fir ceiling which continued uninterrupted through the glazing of the walls to form protective porticoes for terraces on both city and garden sides. Exteriors were of unpainted cedar, witrh smooth, flush surfaces only lightly stained and oiled. The roofline was virtually flat, with a deep fascia and wide overhangs. Mrs Burkes had much to do with this. a woman of independent mind and sophisticated in the arts, she had brought in photographs and tear sheets indicating what she wanted. It was she, according to Belluschi, who, aware of the International Style and the acclaim the Neutra house was receiving, insisted on the flat roof."

In the handful of years before and after World War II, architects based in Southern California like Richard Neutra, A. Quincy Jones and Rudolf Schindler gained wide notoriety for their modern, glassy, open-planned homes, particularly the "Case Study" houses. This vernacular, while clearly a sister of the Northwest modernism Belluschi and Yeon practiced, was less dependent on wood and instead usually favored steel and masonry. Yet both Neutra and Jones designed homes in Portland, too, and some are worth consideration for this list, particularly Neutra's Jan De Graaff House from 1940.

"The owners were avid admirers of contemporary architecture, and they sought out Neutra, who enjoyed an international reputation," Hawkins writes. "He would design for them Portland's first residence in the style, which would house the impressive De Graaff collection of modern art and furnishings. The design that Neutra presented," in association with local architect Van Evera Bailey, has all the International style characteristics. Its flat roof, smooth walls, and continuous banks of windows are completely shorn of ornament. Detail is simplified to the extreme to obtain the tight-skinned, box-like appearance that was a quality of the style. The exterior emphasizes long horizontal bands of windows and similar expanses of vertical tongue-and-groove siding. House design had become an abstract art, relying on floating planes of varying irregularity to achieve the assymetrical balance."

Unfortunately, though, this masterful house was in the ensuing years remodeled so extensively that it has become all but unrecognizable from the original. This house hasn't been demolished, but it's no longer Neutra's design.

Of course the modernism exhibited in these houses from the first half of the 20th Century is just one of many styles and idioms expressed in residential architecture. Here in Portland, like any major city, there are Victorian houses, craftsmans, Queen Annes, colonial revival, bungalows, Tudors, and much more. If we're talking about classic houses of the past, in Portland that of course starts with the Pittock Mansion.

The 22-room house, now open to the public, was designed by architect Edward Foulkes and completed in 1914. The mansion sits on 46 acres with a view of five Cascade peaks. The design includes fine plasterwork, cut and polished marbles, cast bronze, and superbly crafted hardwoods and paneling. Its progressive features included a central vacuum system, intercoms, and indirect lighting hidden in alcoves above the walls.

"It typifies the success of the nineteenth-century American entrepreneurial spirit, which, with talent and enormous energy, was able to express itself in the construction of a mighty residence," writes William Hawkins in Classic Houses of Portland: 1850-1950.

"Foulkes, a San Francisco architect, planned two symmetrical angled wins toward the views, the intersections market by twin engaged turrets with conical roofs... A massive, red-tiled, hipped roof with prominent attic dormers sits above the central volume of the house. The axially placed central fireplaces and chimneys peak at the ridge. The house is constructed of dressed Bellingham sandstone, adorned with scrolled and modillioned cornices, a Greek meander entablature, pedimented garden doorways, and balustrated balconies."

Gustav Freiwald House (image courtesy Wikipedia Commons)

Another house Hawkins writes about, and one that received a degree of notoriety in recent years when its owners protested a condo next door that would have dwarfed it, is the Gustav Feeiwald House in Irvington. It is now the Lion & Rose Bed and Breakfast

"At first glance, the house could be of the Queene Anne style, particularly with its corner polygonal three-story turret and wrap-around covered porch. However, if roofs are the determining factor, the house would be of a more Craftsman style....The Freiwald House has the more square proportions, the wider windows, and the curved eave of the Craftsman period, despite the addition of Colonial Revival detailing at porch columns, corner pilasters, and pediments."

The Freiwald House was built in 1906 as a private residence for Gustav E. Freiwald, a 42-year-old German beer brewer who operated breweries and taverns in towns along the Columbia River from Hood River to Astoria. A year earlier, he had hired Emil Schacht, a well-known German-born Portland architect, to design a grand house for him in Irvington. Schacht had already designed a number of brewery buildings and other commercial structures for Freiwald, but the client rejected the house design and hired HH Menges to redesign the house. It is believed that Menges took Schacht's design and added the Queen Anne exterior elements: an octagonal turret, a wide wrap-around porch with Ionic columns, and a large dormer with an arched window and balcony.

One mustn't forget seminal Portland architect AE Doyle when discussing 20th Century houses, even if Doyle is better known for larger-scale projects like Central Library, the Benson Hotel, and the recently demolished Riverdale School. Among Doyle's best may have been the Edward Harmon House from 1908, still standing at NW 26th and Lovejoy.

Doyle's Harmon House (image courtesy Wikipedia Commons)

Doyle, Hawkins writes, "had just established his practice in the city - the beginning of a long and distinguished career - when he designed the house with the solid, wide proportions then in vogue. The segmental-arched and transomed windows, the solid porch columns, and the shed dormer were Craftsman elements, as is the wrap-around hip at the gable ends - an inventive, almost Japanese form...Combined with these details are the Classical brick quoins at the corners of the house, the flat modillions at the eaves, and the non-fluted Doric columns that support the covered entry pergola."

Most every house I've written about so far, be it contemporary or historically styled, was built in the first half of the 20th century. So what about the second half?

One house that immediately comes to mind actually might not be eligible, for two reasons: it's in Vancouver, Washington and its architect, Rick Potestio, is part of the jury picking Portland Monthly's list. That said, the Burch House from 1999, which won Potestio the top local AIA award, is exceptional.

Potestio's Birch House (image courtesy Portland Modern)

“This house to date is still the most sophisticated and completely executed project I’ve done,” Potestio told me in an interview last year for Portland Modern. “It was truly an inspired client who as a businessman was very specific about budget and what he wanted. He wanted it to be evocative of an Asian aesthetic and to be able to bring people from around the world to see it was a work of art.”

Potestio said he conceived the house to play with the Venetian notion of a plaza on the water. But on the side it becomes more of a sculptural fragmented piece in order to frame different views. “This is a 50x80 subdivision lot located on the banks of the Columbia River and surrounded by park space as well as very mediocre tract houses,” he explained, “so the question was how to grab hold of something physically in this landscape when we couldn’t actually touch it. How can we get it to relate only to the sky, the water, and the trees? So we designed it from the inside out, manipulating the view to see trees and sky. That’s what explains the cutouts and the recesses.”

Most of all, the house is designed to capture views of the Columbia River, and to make it feel even closer than it appears. “We used proportion and modulation of space to create optical illusions,” he adds. “When you’re approaching the house through a very narrow space to an entry court at the center of the house, you see this wall of blue at the other end. The layering of screens and other grids of windows create the optical illusion of flattening out the space. By the time you get out to the deck, you’re so encompassed in the space, you don’t want to leave.”

Zaik's Zidell House (collage courtesy Portland Modern)

One other candidate from the latter 20th century I also think is worth considering for the houses list: architect Saul Zaik's Zidell House.

In 1970, shipyard magnate Arnold Zidell asked Zaik to design a house on a ship's mast. "I said 'That sounds like a lot of fun,'" Zaik told The Oregonian's Jeff Kuechle in a 2009 story about the house. "I get odd requests all the time - I never have an easy job."

Zidell had salvaged a mast 36 inches in diameter and nearly 100 feet long from a decommissioned ship and wanted to use it to support a circular rotating house high above Portland's West Hills. Such rotating houses had already been built in Southern California and Connecticut. Zaik, after consulting with a structural engineer, he concluded it would be imprudent to make the house rotate like some of those predecessors. But the octagonal two-story home offered sweeping views and a ground floor 47 feet in the air.

Zaik's Zidell House (photo by Motoya Nakamura, courtesy The Oregonian)

"Steelworkers from Zidell's shipyard descended on the site, off Fairmount Drive in the West Hills, drove a foundation deep into bedrock and set to work bolting on the cantilevered trusses that would support the house," Kuechle wrote. Zaik said he chose cedar shingles because "it's 40 feet in the air - you don't want to have to paint it every few years."

"It's just one of those places," says current owner Lance Crosier. "It's perfect - even on miserable days, it's bright and sunny. You can see the whole city. I can watch the fireworks on the river, I can see Vancouver Lake and Camas; if I stand on my tiptoes, I can see halfway to Alabama."

Portland Monthly's issue with the top 10 local houses of the 20th Century will be published this spring, and our jury will be convening in January. Before we get together and start making our list, what other houses might we consider? What are the best 20th Century houses in Portland to your eyes?

Each year during the Portland Architecture + Design Festival in October, the night before the Design Awards ceremony features an evening with the jury in which they discuss not only their own work, but the trio's collective observations about Portland and the design being generated here.

So was the case two weeks ago with the jury for the 2010 AIA Portland Design Awards: Reed Kroloff of the Cranbrook Academy of Art and Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (and previously the editor of Architecture magazine), John Peterson of Peterson Architects and Public Architecture in San Francisco, and Joan Soranno of HGA Architects and Engineers in Minneapolis.

"How pleased we were with the work we saw," said Kroloff, who also headed the Portland Aerial Tram design competition here in 2003. "We saw almost 80 projects. Usually as a jury you put a whole mess on the table and 90 percent of them fall on the floor on Day One and then you get together on Day Two and argue a lot about five or six projects. That wasn’t how it worked here at all. We looked at those 80 projects and we came back on Day Two and there were still 30 or 35 of them on the table. Which says a lot about the quality of the work. We weren’t keeping them on the table because we’re sympathetic to people in Portland, because of all the rain. It really wasn’t that at all. I live in Detroit. So screw your rain!"

Juror Reed Kroloff (photo courtesy Cranbrook Academy of Art)

"But not all of the conversation was happy talk," Peterson added. "There were a number of projects that we spent a lot of time really arguing over whether they should be moved forward."

The jury also commended the budget conscious economy in the collective submittals. "There were quite a few projects that were of the magnitude of $40 a square foot, or $80 a square foot," Soranno said. "It is really really tough to do a project of good design.I think with this economy, where clients don’t have a lot of money to spend sometimes, it was hopeful for us to see these examples and realized you don't need $500 or $600 a square foot to do something really wonderful."

A particular trend in this year's award submittals was the high number of houses. Usually architects design only the smallest minority of single-family homes in America, said to be less than 10 percent. And one would expect during recession the amount of house commissions to go down. But perhaps during tough economic times, more architecture firms are motivated to reduce fees and make residential design more attainable.

After and before at Atelier Waechter's Cape Cod residence (photo by Sally Schoolmaster)

Each year during this event the jury faces the challenge of talking about particular projects without divulging any information about which ones actually were going to win awards the following night. But architect Ben Waechter must have felt good about his chances when both of the projects he submitted, the Cape Cod residence and the Z-Haus, became discussion topics. Both wound up winning awards the following night.

"This is just fantastic in our world," Soranno said of Waechter's Cape Cod residence in Portland. "Again, with very very limited budget the design totally transformed this house. Yet one of the things we noted was that the fact that the stoop was left entact so there was this kind of remnant of this lost house. The composition is really nice."

"Often what we’re paying attention to in these houses is how they dealt with modest budgets but still did something that was strikingly architectural," Peterson said. "In this case, where they scraped the pitched roof off and built the box on top of it, you had such a dramatic shift in the character that it became a conversation about architecture for anybody that walked by. And whether it’s a positive conversation or a negative one, it’s still a conversation. For all of us, that’s a critical factor."

BodyVox Dance Center (photo courtesy BOORA Architects)

Adaptive re-use was another theme the jury noted. "Over the last 60 years it’s moved from zero percent of the building industry just after World War II to close to a third of architectural practice today," Peterson said. But in this case, the jury was complimentary about two projects that did not win awards the next night: Hennebery Eddy's conversion of a former Tri-Met bus shelter into a coffee bar, and BOORA's renovation of an old Pearl District warehouse into studios and performance space for BodyVox dance company.

"This project to readapt them as yet another place to ingest coffee was met by the jury with a very positive response," Kroloff said of the shelter conversion. "Not everything about it. There was a significant part of the detailing we thought could have been better considered, but there were parts of it that we all liked."

Of BodyVox, Peterson said, "We appreciated the reserve here. This is a nationally registered building, but the delicate hand…Sometimes cleaning up the interior is one of the most important things you can do as a designer, so we were glad to see this building was handled so gracefully."

The trio also had fun talking about Skylab Architecture's renovation of a Brooklyn building into the headquarters for the Flavor Paper wallpaper company. "This is quite a complex mixed use project. We’ve got a manufacturer who is also a retailer who is also a residential tenant. But have you guys seen pictures of this? Total sex pad. This is an Austin Powers experience."

Kroloff also had some practical advice about awards submittals. "There were moments where we really wished the submitters had provided us with more information," he said. "It’s important in any kind of competition process that…maybe you read the submission requirements really well, which I think everybody did in this case, but then you think beyond them, not to subvert the requirements, but to make sure within the limited frame of expression that you’re given within any submission package that you’re still able to convey the message of your work the way you want the jury to see it."

"And there’s a couple of things to remember on that," Kroloff added. "One, the jury sees it for about that long [snapping his finger], so there’s got to be a way for the jury to ingest the critical issues of that project quickly, and in a way that is intriguing. The second thing is that, although a jury will try and read the commentary, you don’t want it to be some Dostoyevsky experience. At the same time, you’ve got to be succinct and compelling. Try and think of this as a short story. And be careful what you choose. Certain pictures don’t really tell you anything." He then showed onscreen a picture of the corner of a building from one submittal. What does it tell me about the building? Yeah, it’s CORE-TEN [weathered steel], but what do you see there? If you’ve only got eight pictures to show, why that?

"We’re all familiar as architects with putting together awards submittals," Soranno continued. "Especially as you get older and you’re on more juries, you start to get wise to how you put together an awards package. You see some submittals that are all details and you don’t see the overall. Or when you see the overall it’s a twilight shot and it’s so dark that you can’t see all of the exterior. As a juror, you start to say, 'What does the whole look like? Is there something the designers don’t like that they’re nt showing?' It’s making sure that the package at some level is addressing the whole."

Kroloff was especially prickly about night and dusk photography, which may tick off some photographers. But his point was a practical one, not an an artistic one. "A lot of submittals rely on twilight shots or night shots. At the magazine we called those 'cheaters' because you’re relying on an optical effect of light to try and convey a certain type of message of warmth and receptability, not the character of the building. Because generally if a building is in twlight or the dark, you’re not seeing the building. And if the building is being professionally photographed anyway, they’re lighting the building artificially anyway to hype up the lit effect. You never actually see it that way in reality. When I was at Architecture magazine, we never published a single night shot ever. Because they just don’t tell the truth. And so when you choose pictures for a jury, you want to make sure that you’re telling the truth about the building in some fashion. If it’s critical for it to be seen at sunset or at night, it better be because there’s an important lighting experiment or endeavor going on in that project. So be careful about how you choose your limited number of pictures."

The John E. Jaqua Academic Center for Student Athletes at the University of Oregon in Eugene was the top winner at Saturday's AIA/Portland Design Awards gala. Designed by ZGF Architects, the building was this year's sole winner of the Honor Award, AIA's top prize.

Surrounded by a reflecting pool, the building is a steel and glass cube with a ventilated double-skin glass facade. Floor to ceiling glass allows natural daylight to flood the interior space and a stainless steel screen forms a layer within the glass cavity. Inside, the building is centered around a large three-story atrium that is bisected with glass-ensconced catwalks. The interior design, particularly in these public areas, utilizes a series of massive wall displays. One is made from thousands of photos of current student athletes that were etched onto metal paneling and combine to form a likeness of Albert Einstein. On another wall (pictured above), the names and likenesses of past UO athletes are etched onto square wood blocks that jut in and out of the wall.

When I visited the Jaqua Center last January with ZGF partner Eugene Sandoval, he explained how in client meetings then-Oregon football coach Mike Bellotti emphasized the desire for a building that celebrated the natural beauty of Oregon. Bellotti spoke to Sandoval of how the surrounding landscape was a recruiting tool for luring top athletes from other regions of the country, and asked for a building that would articulate that sensation.

Three built projects earned the next-tier honor, the Merit Award: the ZIBA World Headquarters by Holst Architecture, the Cape Cod House by Atelier Waechter, and the Twelve West building by ZGF Architects.

ZIBA headquarters, Merit Award winner (photo by Jeff Jahn)

The ZIBA headquarters, located in the Pearl District near Union Station, is a marvel of both natural light and office space-planning. The Holst design created a massive north-facing glass facade that bathes workspaces in illumination. "A spatially rich building on a tight budget," the jury wrote, also noting ZIBA's "beautiful use of wood and metal in a contemporary manner. [Its] interiors are clean and light filled [with] a refined, buttoned-down exterior. Looks like a great place to work."

Personally, this is one of my favorite Portland buildings of the last decade and a major moment for Holst. The firm has won countless design awards in the past, but most always for residential buildings. Here Holst created an innovative corporate headquarters that is quite dazzling. I would have voted it a co-Honor Award winner along with the Jaqua Center.

Cape Cod House, Merit Award winner (photo by Sally Schoolmaster)

Waechter's Cape Cod House was just profiled here on Portland Architecture last week. It's a fine example of how a tiny (650-square-foot) home can be utterly transformed into capital-A architecture on a relatively modest budget. Waechter's Z-Haus also won an award over the weekend, the Citation Award, which is the next tier down. I'd have rated Z-Haus over Cape Cod because of its unique series of half-levels tying together the multistory space, but there's no doubt Cape Cod is deserving as well.

ZGF was certainly the big winner at this year's Design Awards given that the mixed-use building the firm calls home also earned a Merit Award. Given how the building opened in the worst possible economic climate in 2008, it could have been a disaster for the firm and developer Gerding Edlen.

Merit Award winner 12 West (photo by Brian Libby)

As it happens, the Twelve West building is filling up with tenants, and it already boasts the title of first building in the world with vertically-integrated wind turbines. When near the building downtown or in the Pearl, I've already developed a habit of looking toward the top of Twelve West to see if the turbines are spinning.

Along with Z-Haus, the other built-project Citation Award (the third tier of awards) winner was the Flavor Paper building in Brooklyn, designed by Skylab. This is another Portland firm that has become a regular each year in the AIA/Portland Design Awards, having previously taken the Honor Award a couple years ago for the firm's 12th & Alder building and an award for the Departure Lounge atop the Meier & Frank building.

Also this year, Skylab won an Unbuilt Citation Award for the Weave Building, which has been planned for the past year and is hopefully set to break ground after a few false starts. The Weave boasts a very striking facade that implies the notion of weaving: that of the West End and Pearl District neighborhoods it straddles and the blend of creative professionals it will provide workspace for.

When I wrote about the Weave Building in The Oregonian last year, Skylab's Jeff Kovel told me it could come to emblemize how the marriage of small creative-class spaces and distinctive architecture can be a way forward even in the worst of economic climates.

"My hope is it really becomes an example of somebody who went out on a limb and seized an opportunity to do something special," he said. "I think that type of approach is going to become more and more critical across the board. It's going to be harder to succeed with mediocre product or ideas. The competitive environment will hopefully draw more out of people."

Two other projects also received Unbuilt Citation Awards: the David Campbell Memorial to firefighters planned for the East Bank Esplanade and designed by Whelton Architecture; and the Steel Bridge Skatepark designed by DAO Architecture.

The Campbell Memorial commission was won by Whelton in a three-team invited commission for designers who double as Portland State University instructors. The design is comprised of tall lanterns symbolizing firefighters killed in the line of duty. According to a recent Daily Journal of Commerce article, the design has been scaled back. The original, Nathalie Weinstein writes, "called for a sweeping open space along the Eastbank Esplanade, with lanterns to represent each fallen firefighter. But the area it covered was too large, and adding a new lantern for any new death could be expensive for the city and the fire department.

"The new scheme is much smaller but retains the same poetic value as the original,” Whelton told Weinstein. “Now it’s about 6,000 to 7,000 square feet. And instead of adding new lanterns, the lantern lighting patterns will be altered monthly to reflect the historical number of firefighters who died during that month.”

The Steel Bridge Skate Park is described in its submission materials as "a sculptural urban space, optimized for skating, but accommodating the broader community, integrating urban design and infrastructure, architecture, landscape, recreating, and art." The Jury applauded this as "a piece of provocative placemaking that is thoughtful to the skaters and a great transformation of an underutilized 'junk' space."

One project earned this year's Craftsmanship Award: a private residence by TVA Architects in Nevada that overlooks Lake Tahoe and the Sierra Nevada mountains. The award submission descibes how "two buildings mirror one another and are connected to one another via a boardwalk running through a graveled sculpture garden. The jury noted the project's "beautiful control of concrete, wood, glass and other materials" and its "marriage of landscape and architecture."

This year's Sustainability Award went to Hayes Freedom High School in Camas, Washington by Mahlum Architects. A 200-student, 20,500 square foot alternative high school named in honor of Camas graduate Denis Hayes, the building school caters to students with alternative learning styles and needs as part of a downtown campus. The Jury "appreciated how the project incorporates a comprehensive environmental approach while making an important social statement by creating a permanent home for non-traditional students" and lauded "how the project incorporates sustainability into the learning experience."

Patton Park Apartments, Mayor's Award winner (photo by Sally Painter)

The Mayor's Award for Design Excellence went to the Patton Park Apartments by SERA Architects. Patton Park is the first new transit oriented development to be built along the Interstate MAX light rail line. The five-story building, created for Reach Community Development includes 54 units for working families and 4,600 square feet of commercial space.

A&CMAPAC, People's Choice Award winner (photo by Kirsten Force)

This year's People's Choice Award went to Ankrom Moisan's design for the Arts & Communications Magnet Academy Performing Arts Center in Beaverton. The project includes a 400-seat theater, experimental studio, support spaces and art galleries for an award-winning magnet arts school that previously had to stage its productions in a Quonset hut.

Several years ago I flew to Los Angeles to report for the New York Times on a competition called “Dead Malls”. This wasn’t a competition for an actual brick-and-mortar commission, but instead what is sometimes called an “ideas competition”.

The idea behind that competition was to generate new ideas for the growing amount of abandoned suburban shopping malls across America. There were all kinds of proposals, from arts facilities to prisons. But the idea I didn’t see in that competition was the sole one that made any sense: simply stitching malls into city fabric by making them mixed use with a variety of housing and other private and public spaces, a variety of scales (both for the architecture and the businesses there), and better access for pedestrians and mass transit.

All this time later, MulvannyG2 Architecture has been named a winner in a similar ideas competition, held by the International Council of Shopping Centers. The ICSC’s Future Image Architecture Competition asked firms to address a potential “big box” store design built 50 years from now. MulvannyG2 won in the “Green” category for an entry that offers a six-step sustainable strategy for adapting abandoned large format stores into new uses.

MulvannyG2’s winning entry, “ReStart, ReConnect, ReVive, ReTurn, ReClaim, ReEnvision” works on the premise that by 2060 large format stores’ current suburban locations will become urban as density spreads and escalates. Global warming, presumably, would have wrought substantial climate change by that time, and fossil fuel resources would have dwindled far past peak-oil. This, the architects reasoned, would in turn provide greater incentive for large format stores’ adaptive reuse; they will become too valuable a resource to lie abandoned as many do today, or even to be functioning with that low level of density and seas of asphalt parking lots.

Sitting down with a quartet of architects from the firm recently, they discussed additional impetus behind the winning design.

“The crux of it really was stitching everything together so it would be a living entity again,” MulvannyG2’s Jonathan Dunn said.

The competition entry used an actual outer-Portland site, at 122nd and Glisan, as its starting point. “With sustainability, especially, site is so important,” said Dunn, who also co-chairs the AIA/Portland chapter’s Committee on the Environment. It’s the crux of how you take a building and shape it to the site.”

“We had a lot of conversations about the right approach,” MG2's Darren Schroeder said. “We wanted something that links everything together and is mixed use but has the financial underpinnings to work. We tried to look at this from a developer’s perspective. That part of it said, there’s no reason why these sites can’t evolve the same way the other fabric of the city has developed historically: slowly, in phases, and with multiple users.”

The design splices what was one large mass into multiple levels, cutting courtyards and skylights into the building and creating a succession of different kinds of indoor and outdoor spaces with multiple tenants and many points of entry. The program integrates housing, libraries, markets, restaurants, an amphitheater, open space, and even farming.

The design also presumes that fewer people would be driving cars in 50 years, so there is less than half the amount of parking spaces allotted. That’s the part of this process that may have been the most fun for the architects. Not only did they cut the amount of spaces, but also made them less obtrusive. Do shopping mall developers have any idea how ugly parking lots are? Burying them underground is more expensive, but you also get what you pay for.

“Those are the pressures of the trade,” Schroeder said. You have to be able to understand how important parking is to your client, but you also have to be able to show your client the value in wrapping it in.”

Developers of suburban shopping malls typically have looked for as much as five parking spots for every thousand square feet of spaces. With all that reclaimed space, the design added more greenspace.

MulvannyG2 also sought to bring a more local focus to a format that is usually dominated by chains. “Small local businesses was a huge focus. This used to be the big box chain and this is a complete opposite. Maybe that’s where we’re moving,” said MG2's Kelly Stewart.

Certainly a mall would start to feel different if it had lots of open greenspace and was oriented around micro-sized retail such as food carts or individual retailers. In fact, it makes me think of Saturday Market, which consists of just such a mix today.

But the reason many of us hate shopping malls is not just the chains or the ugly parking lots, but also the antiseptic feel of the interiors. Some of that bad feeling comes from the lack of natural light and air, but it’s something more, too: the failure of interior design to feel vibrant and varied. “We fight that all over the country,” adds Schroeder, whose firm designs retail facilities for many clients. “We even see it in Times Square.”

Ultimately, though, I can’t help but wonder if it’s not the design of shopping malls that needs to change but the approach of the developer, or even the fact that there is a single developer. “What used to be one big box from a tax lot perspective, a huge multi acre parcel that belongs to one holding company, we’d like to give it more like the function of a city,” Schroeder said. “How many tax lots does the city of Portland have for one block downtown? Why can’t we have 25 tax lots here? That’s where our discussion got excited. We didn’t want it to just be a site plan exercise. The idea about this is it’s supposed to work across economic boundaries. Not just a place to go and party and shop, and not a place to squat in your expensive condo. Just a mixture of demographics.”

It’s impossible to predict the future, but the future of the shopping mall can change before 2060, especially when architects and developers needn’t reinvent the wheel to find what works and what is viable for shoppers and residents. “We can grab a lot of cues from our present and say, ‘What’s important to us now?’ Light and space,” Schroeder concludes. “That’s been the guiding force, for example, in what’s made the pearl successful. Maybe it’s not diverse, but they’ve made it work by just extending the grid.”

“This isn’t a one size fits all solution. You can’t just put an urban farm in the middle of a shopping mall site. But these are under-utilized properties with real estate value. How do we get a return on that value again? Back in the day it was sufficient to do forgettable construction and call it good. Now there’s a greater obligation.”

As it happens, I was in a retail space designed by MulvannyG2 over the weekend: the renovated Fred Meyer store at SE 39th and Hawthorne. It is a big improvement over the old store, with more glass along the perimeter and more greenery in the parking lot. But there is still a lot of windowless concrete wall along Hawthorne, and a convoluted entry-exit area. If you're going to pull off a transformative retail design, it takes a willing client, too.

Portland firms had a substantial presence on both lists. Most notably, SERA Architects was listed at #3, just behind the giant Chicago firm Perkins + Will and EYP Architecture & Engineering of Albany, New York.

Also on the top 10 green firms list was Portland firm ZGF Architects at #10. And DLR Group, which is based in Omaha but has a Portland office, was listed at #9.

Then there was the Architect 50 list, which had ZGF listed as the #7 firm in the country. "ZGF is as green as its Pacific Northwest roots would suggest," the listing text reads, "while its strength in health care, infrastructure, and government work has kept it chugging through the recession." New York-based Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which previously operated a Portland office and designed local landmarks like Memorial Coliseum, the US Bancorp Tower ("Big Pink"), Autzen Stadium and the Standard Insurance Center, was listed as the nation's top firm.

The Architect 50 list is a little different from other lists of top national architecture firms in that it "recognizes ecological commitment and design quality as much as profitability when measuring the country’s very best A, AE, and AEC firms."

Brockman likes the fact that Architect Magazine didn't just add up the number of LEED-rated projects and LEED-accredited professionals to compile the list; also included was a "firm culture" metric, for which SERA earned a high ranking. "I’d hope we keep finding new measures," Brockman said. "What we really want is to inspire more and more firms to be going green faster and faster. But this is a move in the right direction."

Today SERA has about 85 employees, which is about the same number the firm employed two years ago, when the Great Recession was beginning to take its toll. Just breaking even in terms of employee growth during the worst economic climate since the 1930s is pretty impressive. The obvious conclusion to draw is that SERA's focus on green is what allowed the firm to prosper amidst the tough times.

But Brockman says it's not that simple. He points to SERA's diverse portfolio of both public and private clients. The firm is also an employee-owned company, which he says helps them retain talent and keep people motivated. "I sure wouldn’t want the message to be that SERA thinks we are where we ware because of green," he says. "I think of being sustainable in a broad sense. We want to be financially sustainable, protecting and saving staff, and working on green design."

Another key for SERA, Brockman argues, has been the development over the past two years of the firm's in-house Sustainability Resources Group (SURG), comprised of employees with specific areas of sustainable expertise. "We’ve got a mechanical engineer, skin experts, daylighting and lighting experts," he adds. "Two years ago we had two people in that group amongst 85 people on staff and now it’s seven. We’re busy as heck and providing a lot of service to all the projects in the firm. But it’s constantly changing."

Right now SERA is engaged in three major projects: the Oregon Sustainability Center (in partnership with GBD Architects) and a renovation of the Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building (in partnership with Cutler Anderson Architects), both in Portland, as well as an extensive sustainable master-planning process for the city of Liwa in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

The Oregon Sustainability Center, as its website describes, is "a first-of-a-kind synthesis of unparalleled environmental performance with an integrated sustainability agenda, serving both as a technological model and as a hub for sustainable practices, policy, education, research and entrepreneurship." Located on the edge of the Portland State University campus in downtown Portland, the OSC will bring together academic, government, nonprofit and business sectors. It is being designed to achieve triple net-zero performance in energy and water use and carbon emissions, and to meet the world’s most stringent green building criteria, the Cascadia Region Green Building Council’s Living Building Challenge.

The OSC would be upon completion perhaps America's greenest office tower, and that is a hugely impressive achievement for SERA, GBD and developer Gerding Edlen. The only criticism I would personally make is that, to my eyes at least, from a visual, aesthetic standpoint it seems ugly, like a banal office building with a mismatched top. But this is also not a final design, so there is still time to change that. And if I'm critical of the look of the building based on the renderings released so far, let me be absolutely clear in saying that doing any Living Building office is hugely impressive. It's just that architecture is, at its ideal, a marriage of the practical and scientific with art and beauty.

I also wonder if an even greener move would be to build the Oregon Sustainability Center in an existing building, such as the empty US Customs House, which the GSA is currently seeking a tenant for via online auction, or the nearly empty Gus Solomon United States Courthouse downtown on Broadway, just a few blocks from the OSC site. But this is neither SERA's decision nor GBD's to make. That said, SERA has extensive renovation experience with landmark projects like City Hall in Portland. What better way to combine the firm's talents?

For the Abu Dhabi project, SERA and the other firms involved have engaged in what's called "energy-mapping", which Brockman says has "allowed us to map climate effects at a city scale. We’ve been siting and massing the buildings in a way that creates a comfortable place in a harsh environment. To be creating district scale tools that function in real time and allow us to design in real time based on climate and comfort, that’s a whole new world. Which I also think is a theme. It feels more and more like the projects we’re working on are all research, and they’re feeding other projects. The city-scale tool we're using in Abu Dhabi is going to be invaluable with all the eco-district work that will be happening in Portland."

The $133 million Wyatt building project (pictured at the top of this post) has been high profile, earning a feature in the Washington Post. The ultra-green retrofit will include rooftop solar panels supplying up to 15% of the building’s power needs, a new overhanging roof to provide shade, and a water collection and reuse system combined with low-flow fixtures that will reduce potable water consumption by as much as 68%. The big buzz surrounding this project, though, is a 250-foot vertical green wall that will cover the entire western facade of the office tower. Plants will grow on facade ‘fins’ that act like garden trellises during the spring and summer, shading the building to reduce energy bills. In the colder months, the plants will naturally drop their foliage and sunlight can once again penetrate the building to provide warmth.

Hopefully the green wall will actually happen, though. A May 4 report Daily Journal of Commercereport by Nathalie Weinstein suggests the GSA may wind up scrapping the wall due to budget concerns.

Brockman says lessons learned on the Oregon Sustainability Center and the Wyatt building are influencing each other. "We’re designing a new building a few blocks from an existing building retrofit a few blocks from each other, so we can share lessons back and forth," he says. "We learned something on OSC and took it to the Wyatt a week later. And the façade research on Wyatt will very much inform the way we move on the OSC's envelope design. It’s a huge privilege but exciting too."

For all of Portland's leadership in the field of sustainable design, the city and its architecture firms have been continually on the outside looking in when it comes to the biggest national architecture prize for green buildings, The American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment's Top 10 Green Projects list.

Each year the program celebrates, in the AIA's words, "projects that are the result of a thoroughly integrated approach to architecture, natural systems and technology," that "make a positive contribution to their communities, improve comfort for building occupants and reduce environmental impacts through strategies such as reuse of existing structures, connection to transit systems, low-impact and regenerative site development, energy and water conservation, use of sustainable or renewable construction materials, and design that improves indoor air quality."

But despite Portland often being called America's greenest city, and at several junctures having the most LEED-rated buildings of any US city, there has never before been a building project in Portland by a Portland firm to crack the Top Ten. Until now, with the listing of Twelve West, designed (and partially occupied) by ZGF Architects.

Portland has come close to making the Top Ten before. The Gerding Theater at the Portland Armory, designed by GBD Architects, won Honorable Mention for the 2007 list. But it still wasn't in the Top 10. The Wayne Morse Courthouse in Eugene was included in 2007's listing, but Eugene isn't Portland and the lead architect, Morphosis and Pritzker Prize winner Tom Mayne, is based in Southern California. The Lloyd Crossing sustainable design plan was included in 2005, but it was designed by a Seattle firm, Mithun, and is only an urban and greenspace plan, not a building. There was also the Bank of Astoria by Manzanita architect Tom Bender that made the list in 2002, but again, that's something different from Portland.

Photo by Brian Libby

If our city was chasing windmills with the COTE Top Ten in years past, perhaps it took a building with windmills to make the list. That would be Twelve West, the mixed use building designed by ZGF Architects and developed by Gerding Edlen. Besides its other green credentials, including two LEED Platinum certifications, LEED-NC (new construction) overall and LEED-CI for the office interiors at ZGF's headquarters in the building, exceeding current 2030 Challenge benchmarks for energy use, and achieving an overall savings of 46% over a baseline standard, Twelve West also happens to be the first building with wind turbines in an urban setting in the United States.

One thing I've always wondered about the AIA/COTE list is whether they may be any kind of regional or other geographical bias. Was Portland merely being ignored? That seems unlikely, because even Seattle, in the same region, has earned numerous Top 10 listings. Even so, the lack of inclusion for Portland projects always seemed incongruent with what the rest of the green building world was saying about the city.

Yet when I look at the jury for this year's Top Ten, I can't help but wonder if some extra familiarity with Portland and its architects and developers was helpful. After all, this year's jury included Peter Busby, the Vancouver architect with Busby, Perkins & Will. Busby designed the Meriwether Condominiums in South Waterfront in Portland for Gerding Edlen. Did he recuse himself from choosing Twelve West? It doesn't seem so. Then there was Alison G. Kwok from the University of Oregon. She has no connection to Gerding or ZGF that I know of, but her familiarity with local architecture must have helped.

Photo by Brian Libby

There's no doubting, though, that Twelve West deserves to be on the COTE list. The 23-story, 552,000 square foot building was constructed with low-impact materials, including salvaged, reclaimed and FSC-certified wood. Much of the concrete structure is exposed on the interior, minimizing the use of finish material and providing ample thermal mass. A 47% reduction in potable water use is predicted through use of efficient fixtures, low-water roof plantings, and rainwater reuse. And placing the building atop a surface parking lot in Portland's dense urban core (on the site of a former surface parking lot) facilitates a pedestrian oriented, car-free lifestyle for the occupants, which minimizes required parking while increasing density and reducing stormwater runoff.

In the years ahead, it will be interesting to see how Gerding Edlen and ZGF move forward. Gerding has changed its focus from new construction and mixed-use towers to renovating existing buildings, but if the economy were to start booming again, that would likely change. The developer began its rise to prominence with the Brewery Blocks development with GBD Architects, employing the firm for all five buildings plus the Armory and then an additional project, The Casey, just down the street. Those were all LEED-rated project, not to mention the Armory as the nation's first project on the National Register of Historic Places to earn a LEED rating, and The Casey was the first condo. But ZGF has now designed the first Portland building on the COTE Top 10 list, putting the firm on arguably equal fitting with GBD for top-shelf local green architecture credentials. When you couple that with the work ZGF is doing in Eugene for the University of Oregon's athletic department, such as the Jaqua Center and another to-be-announced project, it gives this venerable Portland firm a firm grip on the future.

The 2010 BetterBricks Awards breakfast, held on February 11, honored 12 green building professionals who have, in different ways, championed high-performance buildings in the Pacific Northwest. The awards, presented by BetterBricks, an initiative of the nonprofit Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (and a sponsor of this site), recognize architects, engineers, developers, building owners, building operators, facility managers and other building professionals for their support of high performance, commercial buildings with a special emphasis on energy efficiency in the Northwest.

As an SRG principal for almost 30 years and now the firm’s managing partner, Cusack and his partners have achieved 84 percent LEED accreditation of all staff, and 46 LEED equivalent projects. The firm has committed to the national AIA’s 2030 Challenge. In 2008, Cusack also led SRG’s creation of a graduate research fellowship with the University of Oregon's Energy Studies in Buildings Laboratory. This two year program has further deepened SRG’s collaboration with ESBL to focus on research and firm-wide training/education.

Puget Sound Science Center, photo courtesy SRG Partnership

Among the recent SRG projects to earn significant green credentials are the Da Vinci Arts Middle School for Portland Public Schools (targeted at LEED Platinum); Mt. Angel Abbey’s Annunciation Academic Center, where 95 percent day-lit classrooms and passively cooled ventilation system have become prototypes for many other projects nationally; and the LEED Silver Puget Sound Science Center in Tacoma.

The Facility Manager/Building Operations category saw the award go to a team from Fred Meyer stores. The other finalist was the Melvin Mark Companies Operations Team.

In the Advocate category, the winner was Susan Steward, executive director of BOMA (Building Owners and Managers Association International) Portland. You can find BOMA Portland’s list of advocacy projects here. The organization, for example, is a strong proponent of energy efficiency, and that’s probably a large part of why Steward won. (Wow, that’s eerily appropriate: an advocate named Steward.) An additional finalist in the Advocate was Clark Brockman of SERA Architects.

In the Owner/Decision Maker, the winners were Garrin Royer and Danny McGinley, of Redside Development. The photo below is of the 221 Mollala project Redside previously developed.

Photo courtesy Redside Development

"We got our start in 2002 by focusing on sustainable commercial redevelopment in Oregon and Washington," Redside's website reads. "Today we’re a thriving, fully-integrated commercial real estate company known for successful projects, steady growth and an innovative emphasis on sustainability.

"A lot of people talk the talk when it comes to sustainability. But we actually walk the walk. By integrating construction, property management and facility services into our company, we’re able to apply a green standard to every aspect of a project — from demo and construction all the way to finishes, paint, landscaping and housekeeping."

This year, the BetterBricks Awards introduced a new category honoring a multi-disciplinary team, which is a group of professionals who joined together for a specific high-performance building project. The winning team worked on the Slocum Center for Orthopedics and Sports Medicine: John Bauman; Dr. Thomas Wuest of the Slocum Center; Whitney Churchill of The Neenan Company; Galen Ohmart of Solarc Architecture + Engineering; Brian McCarthy of CMGS Landscape Architects; and Doug McKay and Steve Korth of McKay Investment Company. Finalists were the team behind 12 West, including Gerding Edlen Development; Greg Goodman, the Downtown Development Group, ZGF Architects, Hoffman Construction, Glumac, and KPFF Consulting Engineers.

Winners were selected by a panel of judges comprised of industry professionals and past BetterBricks Awards winners.

To achieve high performance buildings, award winners have used and promoted best practices such as maximizing local climate in the design, employing early design decision-making and energy modeling, supporting building commissioning and implementing better building operations. Their projects have achieved substantial energy savings, reduced building operation and maintenance costs and enhanced productivity of building occupants.

The Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) has announced the winners of Portland’s 2009 Office Energy Showdown. Now in its third year, the Showdown recognizes Portland-area office buildings that have made significant achievements in energy efficiency.

Participation saw a nearly 30 percent increase in the number of participants from the previous year and added nearly four million square-feet of office space to the friendly competition.

Winners were chosen from among 32 properties, representing over 11 million square-feet of office real estate. Challenged to assess their buildings’ energy performance, all participants demonstrated market leadership in quantifying their energy use and establishing baseline data that can be used to track future gains in operating efficiency.

The Grand Prize winner, which receives the “Power Broker” trophy for a property, team, or company achieving an outstanding accomplishment in all-around energy performance was the Melvin Mark Companies, a commercial real estate broker. Melvin Mark's portfolio includes the Sunset Center at Tanasbourne as well as the Columbia Square (pictured above) and Crown Plaza buildings downtown.

Three projects were also singled out for demonstrating the highest energy performance ratings. 1st Place went to the 200 Market Building, managed by the Russell Development Company. 2nd Place was the Gus Solomon Courthouse, managed by the General Services Administration (which probably uses little energy by virtue of being largely empty), and 3rd Place went to the Kruse Woods V project, managed by Shorenstein.

Then there were awards for 'Greatest Improvement', for the properties demonstrating the most significant gains in energy performance rating over the year. 1st place went to the ODS Tower in downtown Portland managed by Ashforth Pacific (now if they could only do something about the hideous sculpture in the front of the building) and designed by ZGF. 2nd Place was Montgomery Park, the Northwest Portland landmark managed by Bill Naito Company. 3rd Place was a tie between the Liberty Centre (Ashforth Pacific) and 1915 Amberglen, managed by KG Investments Management.

If they'd needed to break the tie, I'd have disqualified Liberty Centre for spelling "Centre" like Canadians. That said, Liberty Centre is also noteworthy in that it was originally to be a design by internationally renowned architect Cesar Pelli, before ultimately being designed by Portland's GBD Architects.

Design afficionados (or "designistas", as developer Dennis Wilde has called them) may snicker that many of these buildings are visually unattractive or, in some cases, located in some far-off suburban office park surrounded by surface parking lots. I mean, you never hear someone say, "Have you seen that Kruse Woods V office building in Lake Oswego? What a gorgeous work of architecture! What is that, Koolhaas? Piano, Meier?" But energy efficiency is one of the biggest movements of our time, and part of a regional effort to reduce the need for coal-fired power plants by cutting our power addiction. What some of these projects lack in looks or location, they admirably atone for by being as efficient as they can be.

The renovation of Shattuck Hall at Portland State University by SRG Partnership and the bSIDE6 mixed-use building by Works Partnership Architecture (pictured at left in a shot by Stephen Miller) walked away with the two Honor Awards (the highest prize given out) at last Saturday's Design Awards Gala honoring the best architectural design of the year.

It's not a surprise that bSIDE6 won. Although it's only the first built project by Works Partnership to be new from the ground up (versus a renovation), the firm has established an incredible track record when it comes to these AIA/Portland design awards, having won an award for 11 of the 12 projects they have submitted in the last five years. (The project team for bSIDE6 was Bill Neburka, Carrie Schilling and Jennifer Dzienis.)

What's more, bSIDE6 is a bold-looking, unabashedly modern building that harkens to the East Burnside vernacular of building arcades that shelter the sidewalks outside while pushing the envelope of how sculptural and three-dimensional a building facade can be.

As Amara Holstein wrote of bSIDE6 in Portland Monthly, the building's "seven stories of work studios and retail space that seem to float above the street in a Tetris-like façade....With ribbons of dark-gray metal playing hide-and-seek with sleek glass, the structure mixes sexy and stern like no other building in the city. Yet Works Partnership’s bold, column-free reinterpretation of the lower East Burnside tradition of covered sidewalks nestles the building like a puzzle piece into the street’s ramshackle collection of bars, vintage retailers, and coffee shops as seamlessly as the new Ziba headquarters does in the far tonier Pearl."

Shattuck (pictured above) is now home to PSU's architecture department, and with SRG's help the circa-1915 red brick former elementary school was transformed into a more dynamic interior environment with an open plan, naturally-lit studios, a rooftop gallery, and an extensive materials lab encompassing model-making, woodworking, metalworking, and casting shop. In addition to the Honor Award, Shattuck's redesign also won the Sustainability Award, which is no small achievement in a city whose architecture community is all about sustainability.

That Shattuck Hall won the top Honor Award was a little surprising, at least to me, but there's no doubt the design work, by a project team that included principal Kent Duffy as well as Skip Stanaway, Louise Foster, Jon Mehlschau, Eric Wilson, Nita Posada, Emily Dawson and Kendall Harris, was first rate.

Besides the two Honor Awards, seven projects received the second-tier Merit Award:

The Park Box in Portland (pictured at right), a duplex home by PATH Architecture (this project also won the night's only Craftsmanship Award). I previously wrote about the Park Box for Dwell magazine when it was part of the 11xDesign Tour last spring, although at the time it was under construction. Designer Corey Martin of PATH and his family are the residents.

The Cyan Building, also in Portland, in a joint venture by THA Architecture and GBD Architects. This is a condo project meant to appeal to a more modest income level than the higher-end condos Gerding Edlen (the developer for Cyan) has built in the past. I visited and wrote a blog post about the Cyan a few months ago. Besides its strong sustainability quotient, I was also a fan of the project's undulating facade.

The Portland Mall Revitalization by ZGF Architects (also pictured at right). Most of us are still getting our feet wet experiencing the new MAX light rail line traversing Fifth and Sixth Avenues downtown, but the jury, headed by acclaimed Phoenix architect Will Bruder (now a visiting professor at Portland State), was very fond of how the new rail extension and its stops interact with the array of buses, cars and pedestrian all around. Besides Bruder, of Will Bruder + Partners in Phoenix, the jury included Mark Cavagnero of Mark Cavagnero Associates in San Francisco and Brigitte Shim of Shim-Sutcliffe Architects in Toronto.)

The Reserve in Portland by Hennebery Eddy Architects (pictured at right). No, it's not the local golf course of the same name. The Reserve is a renovation of the striking trapezoid-shaped Federal Reserve bank just south of Burnside in downtown Portland, designed by legendary Portland architect Pietro Belluschi and completed in 1949. It's great to see an under-appreciated Belluschi work be given new life. And in going from a security-conscious bank to a mixed use program, the project has brought in lots more natural light.

Thurston Elementary School in Springfield, Oregon by Mahlum Architects. Incidentally, the jury for this year's awards did not supply AIA with comments about the awards (tisk tisk, gang), but when this same project was honored by the Southwest Oregon AIA chapter, the jury noted how Thurston's design was "distilled, simple, not overly structured" and "a wonderful plan that keys outdoor spaces with indoor ones." Mahlum has made its name largely with a host of similarly sustainable K-12 schools and college buildings; they've got this down.

The Tempe Transportation Center in Tempe, Arizona, in a joint venture by Otak and Architekton. This a mixed-use transit center designed to accommodate the region’s increased business needs while integrating with its new multimodal transportation opportunities. The project is expected to earn LEED-Platinum certification.

Citation Awards, the next-tier prize, went to two projects:

The Nines hotel by SERA Architects, a renovation of the historic Meier & Frank building along the north edge of Pioneer Courthouse Square that was originally designed by the great Portland architect A.E. Doyle.

Shaver Green by DECA Architecture. DECA also won a design award last year, and it wasn't their first.

There were also both Merit and Citation awards given out to four unbuilt projects:

A Merit for the TriMet South Terminus by Hennebery Eddy Architects

A Merit for the Muslim Community Center of Portland, by Architecture Office. I met with Garrett Martin and the rest of this firm a few weeks ago to learn about this project (a separate post is forthcoming soon) and was hugely impressed.

A Citation for an as-yet unnamed workforce housing project designed by Works Partnership and co-developed by Randy Rapaport, the latter of whom previously worked with Holst Architecture to build the award winning Belmont Street Lofts and Clinton Condominiums. Like the Muslim center, I recently met with the architects to learn more about this project and plan to blog about it soon. This isn't just an impressive design, but outright reinvents affordable housing in Portland and the United States both from a design standpoint as well as an economic one.

A Citation for TandemDUO, a duplex house by Works Partnership

The People's Choice Award went to the Paradise Visitors Center within Mount Rainier National Park, designed by Fletcher Farr Ayotte.

And the Mayor's Award for Design Excellence, given out since the late 1990s when it was initiated by Mayor Vera Katz as part of her Mayor's Design Initiative (something I'd like to see rekindled), went to the Williams Five Condos by PATH Architecture. I wrote about the Williams Five in a blog post a few months ago. It's an excellent work of infill multifamily housing, one that PATH also co-developed.

So if you're playing along at home, that makes it three total awards this year for Works Partnership, including an Honor Award. Works also won two awards at last year's AIA ceremony. Also picking up three was PATH Architecture, although two awards were for the same project. Not far behind is Hennebery Eddy with two awards.

One other award to announce: Remember the Root Awards that Portland Spaces magazine gave out last November? Well, those aren't happening this year. But Spaces and Portland Monthly editor Randy Gragg did give out at the AIA ceremony on Saturday the same lifetime achievement award that came out of the Root Awards last year. It went to Saul Zaik, one of the city's last great remaining midcentury-modern architects. Some of Zaik's houses, as you can see from a story I wrote earlier this year about the architect for Portland Modern, are sublime. Kudos to Randy and the magazine for recognizing him.

Recently the American Institute of Architects announced the recipients of its 2009 National Healthcare Design Awards, honoring two built projects and one unbuilt project. And both of the built projects are located here in Portland: the Providence North Portland Clinic on Interstate Avenue, designed by Mahlum, and the Peter O. Kohler Pavilion at Oregon Health & Science University on Marquam Hill, designed by the Los Angeles office of Chicago-based Perkins + Will.

I wrote about the awards for this week's issue of Architecture Week magazine, which you can read here.

The Providence clinic is a departure for the client. "All the rest of their clinics have red brick," Anne Schopf, a principal at Mahlum, told me for the story. "We really wanted to create a new face for them, a new attitude."

The building is more contemporary than other Providence clinics, with an expansive glass facade along Interstate. Rick Potestio, the acclaimed Portland architect who was working for Mahlum at the time, also told me, "We believed that the site, on Interstate Avenue, merited a civic-scaled building, not a one-story building that looked like it could be a pancake house." The solution was a single-story building with a butterfly roof in which the east and west elevations reaching two stories in height.

The butterfly roof form allows daylight into the middle of the building, which is divided into three clinical pods centered on open nurses' stations, trading some privacy for openness. The pods are faced with murals visible from the street through a floor-to-ceiling glass wall.

The Kohler Pavilion at OHSU didn't even have a site when the design began. A site had to be carved out of Marquam Hill by replacing an existing roadway. Now, however, the building acts as the visual face of the hilltop campus as it looks out to the east. The Kohler has a striking glass facade, and one's eye is also drawn to the building because it acts as the upper terminus for the Portland Aerial Tram.

The new building houses an intensive care unit, operating rooms, and treatment suites, and the new Center for Women's Health. The pavilion's arrival court includes a large garden area sitting atop a 450-space parking structure. "One of [then-OHSU president] Peter Kohler's strong directives was he didn't want to look down and see cars parked," Nick Seierup of Perkins + Will said in the story. "So any view looks out over greenery." Cascading landscaped roof decks provide intimate gardens as well as terraces for the public to enjoy the panoramic views.

Both projects also reflect a strong trend in healthcare design towards interiors that aid in the healing process, P+W's Seierup added. "Studies actually prove patient outcomes are improved by access to views and natural daylight. And it's proven to have a lasting beneficial effect on staff. They make fewer errors; they're able to read charts better. There's a whole trickle-down of effects."

An interdisciplinary team including two Portlanders, architect Aaron Whelton of AAW Studio and planner Jacob Brostoff of the city of Portland, took first place in an ideas competition sponsored by the Southern California Institute of Architecture (Sci-Arc) and The Architect's Newspaper.

The competition, entitled "A New Infrastructure: Innovative Transit Solutions for Los Angeles," invited designers to imagine LA's transit solutions for 30 to 50 years in the future. Judges included some heavy hitters of Los Angeles architecture, such as Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, and Neil Denari.

The winning entry, called "Más Transit" is according to the press release "a regional high-speed rail system for Los Angeles with a landscape to match. Promoting dense, organic development, it diversifies the communities in the built environment, making travel less necessary, easier and more predictable, and bypassing roadway congestion through a new raised infrastructure."

Looping around the city, with connections to subways, light rail and buses, MásTransit links local and inter-regional commuting, providing frequent service that will also sync up with the California High Speed Rail network. San Diego via m·sTransit is less than an hour away, including transfer times; San Francisco is less than three hours away."

Now if we could only get some people started on imagining regional high-speed rail for the Pacific Northwest. At the very least, there needs to be a high-speed line connecting Portland and Seattle. Really, it ought to also include connections to Vancouver (BC), Bend, Tacoma, Olympia, Salem and Eugene or maybe even to Medford and San Francisco. Much more than a new bridge for the Columbia River and Interstate 5, we need high speed rail. However, maybe rail could also be incorporated into this crossing.

Meanwhile, congratulations to Whelton, Brostoff and the rest of their team.

Interior Design Magazine has awarded Skylab Architecture a 'Best of Year' award for the design of the branding agency North. The 10,000 square foot office situated in the Lane-Miles Standish building (formerly home to an 85-year old printing business and now on the National Register of Historic Places) took the Best Small Office category.

North sought a new kind of office that would reduce or eliminate the traditional cubicle and stretch the parameters of working in a creative environment. The design responds to alternative social interactions with a series of breakaway modules for working, eating, collaborating and lounging. A stacked, cantilevered think module reveals a newly articulated view of the West Hills through clerestory windows in the building. A series of interspersed glass and metal panels define the edit module, two soundproof rooms without doors. Taking a universal icon for quick creative thought, the media module is post-it note yellow.

The magazine also honored Zimmer Gunsul Frasca for its design of the University of Oregon Athletic Medical Center. "When student athletes first enter this sports-therapy and training facility," writes ID's Nicholas Tamarin, "they're greeted by a zigzagging white Corian bench that unravels like a roll of sports tape. And that's just the beginning of the athletic imagery Zimmer Gunsul Frasc Architects created for this 15,000-square-foot center. A seating area features four sandblasted glass screens depicting students in various athletic poses, images made from the names of the school's former athletes, while an adjacent oak wall is branded with the names of the school's most important coaches. The school's "O" logo is depicted in a large relief comprising 3,000 aluminum rods that pierce a glass wall in the nutrition bar. Even there, the stools boast leather covers laser-cut with sport statistics."

This was Interior Design’s third annual Best of Year Awards, with winners in 62 categories from a pool of nearly 1,300 entries. An award ceremony was held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York on December 4th, 2008. The winners are featured in the December issue of Interior Design.

"The building's minimal interiors combine attractive design with eco-consciousness in a way that's right at home in the Pacific Northwest," wrote Cool Hunting's Doug Black.

The other four winners were all European architects or firms: Englishmen Nicholas Grimshaw (for an experimental media center at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York) and Thomas Heatherwick (a cafe in Littlehampton, England), Dutch architect Trude Hooykaas (for the Kraanspor dock-to-office development), and the French company Abilmo (for their 'Pop-up Hotel' rooms).

This award also feels like somewhat of a vindication for the Randy Rapaport-developed Clinton condos. There has been some hostility from neighbors who feel the bold modern look doesn't fit its context, or that the project turns a blind eye to Division Street, or regret the historic home displaced from the site. And to extent, there's some validity in those claims. Nevertheless, I marvel at the Clinton Condos every time I see the building, particularly its jewel-like front facade and its sumptuous mahogany trim at ground level.

On Wednesday night at the Portland Art Museum, Portland Spaces magazine gave out its first annual Root Awards in about 25 different categories.

After a sponsor presentation from Nike on their new recycled basketball shoes, master of ceremonies for the event was performance artist Andrew Dickson. I've loved Dickson's work for years, such as his "Ebay power seller" routine at the TBA Festival. However, I had to laugh a little at how things have panned out for Dickson. A couple years ago I reviewed for The Oregonian a performance of Dickson's in which he wrestled over the course of an evening with whether his having done a single contract job for Wieden + Kennedy advertising was "selling out". (I didn't ever think it was.) Now, though, that issue must be resolved, because he's now on staff at W+K, and with all due respect to Andrew, this one time starving artist is even looking, dare I say it, maybe a little plumper now. (But then, who am I to talk as a balding, increasingly heavier short guy?)

The Root Awards were given out in three principal categories: Home, Work, and Play, with additional 'Masters' lifetime achievement awards and a special extra category.

The workplace-oriented awards went to four projects. Communitecture, Mark Lakeman's venerable (and quintessentially hippy-Portland) firm, won in the 'entry' category for its Sisters of the Road Cafe - a well deserved honor for a humble food kitchen. Skylab won the 'office' category in designs for the branding company North (pictured above), while Holst Architecture was honored for the main conference room at the new AIA/Portland Center for Architecture. BOORA Architects won the 'lounge' award for the communal work spaces in the firm's own new offices.

The home-centered awards were the biggest category with 11 honors. The overall 'home' award went to architect Nathan Good for his Canon Beach Residence (pictured). This choice surprised me for a couple reasons. First, Nathan is based in Salem now, which I'd think would disqualify him. Second, the runners up were Skylab's M1 house and Giulietti/Schouten's Walnut House, both of which I found far more visually compelling. But Good's project is a net-zero energy house, which the jury understandably found impressive. And it's not like he's not deserving; that project is terrific. I was just aesthetically more jazzed by the other nominees. The comment from juror Iris Harrell may also be telling: "Very Oregonian, very green, very beautiful in a timeless, earthy way." Smacks just a little of Oregon cliche.

Also in the home category, the 'building' award went to the Orchid Street City Homes, a LEED Platinum-rated duplex by Building Arts Workshop. I'm not sure how this category differs from the one Nathan Good won, but the Orchid project is impressive.

Meanwhile, other awards in this category: Arciform won the 'interior' award for their 'Ranchel' remodel (I prefered finalist Jessica Helgerson for the Zahoudani Residence). Architecture W won for their 'Stump House' in Northeast Portland. I wrote about this house recently for an upcoming Dwell magazine issue and loved it. The home is expected to also earn a Platinum LEED rating and features a remarkable solar heating system.

Continuing the home category, BOORA Architects won the 'room' award for its Kitchel Residence, while remodeling company Neil Kelly won the 'kitchen' category for its Ganzini Residence. This was another case were I preferred a different finalist: Paolo Design Group for its 'Tile quilt of many colors' kitchen. Neil Kelly also won the 'bathroom' category for its Young residence, although again I preferred Corso Staicoff's Penthouse Bath project.

The 'outdoor' category honored Go Yurt Shelters for its Modern Green Yurt, while the 'yard' category bestowed its prize on the Chicken Sedan by Harley Cowan, a chicken coup which also won the AIA/Portland People's Choice Award. The architect sitting next to me was rolling his eyes with exasperation when the chicken coup won, but its charm is easily apparent. Not to put all my eggs in one basket or ruffle anyone's feathers, but I for one am glad the jurors weren't chicken about singling out this project. Maybe they were just winging it.

Sienna Architecture and architect Jeff Lamb won the 'crafted detail' award for their Del Castello Penthouse. This is another hugely impressive project which I had the good fortune to check out while writing a recent article for Luxe magazine. Jeff basically created an entire art gallery in this Vancouver penthouse's foyer.

The 'furniture' award within the homes category went to Jason Andrew Designs for the Genevieve chest of drawers (pictured), but the other two finalists--The Joinery's 'studio chair' and JHL Design/Modern Organic Architecture's Beam Chaise--were also excellent. Portland seems to have a bright future in furniture, which fits our city's interest in craft.

I also briefly wanted to mention Decca Deca Architecture. They didn't win any awards, but they were nominated for several.

But damn, it's tiring me out just writing all these award results. Good thing there was a full bar while these things were being given out! Hey Randy, aren't there 20 or 30 more honors you'd like to bestow while I take a nap? After all, I didn't see a 'closet' or 'cupboard' category in the home awards. How about honoring laundry rooms, or garages while we're at it? Or maybe another dance routine? (There were modern dances performed by Linda Austin and others in between categories.) Just teasing of course - it was a nicely run affair. Awards shows are just natural targets for ridicule, I think, because it's inherently weird quantifying work like this, and because it makes for a long evening, even in a best-case scenario.

The 'play' category first honored architect Von Tundra in the 'eat/drink' award for Sip (pictured), a juice cart renovated from a 40-year-old trailer. The 'retail' award went to Communitecture for The Rebuilding Center. I absolutely love this project, with its facade of mismatched windows and building parts. But wasn't it built a few years ago? I wondered if that occurred to Ziba Design, which had both of the other finalists for this award, for its Umpqua Bank flagship and its South Waterfront Discovery Center. Oh wait - the Discovery Center is years old too.

The 'hospitality' category was a hotly contested one given the number of new hotels and hotel renovations happening here lately. The award went to Hotel Deluxe, a renovation of the beloved Mallory Hotel by Hennebery/Eddy, which beat out the also excellent Hotel Modera by Holst and Corso Staicoff and the mediocre-looking Lions Gate Inn by Robert Knowles Construction. Even so, the jury's favorite hotel may have been Hotel Murano in Tacoma by Corso Staicoff, which received the 'Portland, World' award for work done outside the city.

The 'landscape/community' award went to Opsis Architecture for the Firstenburg Community Center. Opsis really has a knack with public buildings; I still wish they'd been chosen for PSU's new recreation center downtown.

For all the sustainable building projects in Portland, the 'sustainability' award went not to a piece of architecture, but a new type of wind turbine by Oregon Wind called the Helyx HE-40. It beat out GBD Architects OHSU Center for Health and Healing, a LEED Platinum project that is maybe the greenest large medical building in America.

Finally, the 'rising star' award went to three six honorees: Cecily Ryan of Skylab Architecture (proving Jeff Kovel is not the only star at that firm), interior designer Travis Weedman of Compressed Pattern Design Studio, architect-turned sculptor David Laubenthal of DJL Studio, Works Partnership Architecture, and Eric Kaster of Eleek.

And the 'masters' lifetime achievement awards went to architect Joachim Grube of Yost Grube Hall (pictured in his gorgeous self-designed West Hills home, included in a previous Street of Eames tour) for his work in developing countries (he was also a late-career Pietro Belluschi collaborator), interior designer Mirza Dickel, and builder James Frank. Frank is a former cabinet maker who has helped give some of Rick Potestio's sophisticated designs their essential craftsmanship.

Looking back on the awards overall, even though I joke about so many 'home' category awards and so many overall, I enjoyed seeing the work of many small design firms and companies doing architecture but also furniture, interiors, landscaping, and sustainable product design. A select few firms have now won both AIA or IIDA (interior design) awards and Root Awards this year, such as Corso Staicoff and Works Partnership.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go soak these typing fingers in ice.

Architect Brad Cloepfil's firm, Allied Works, took the top prize at Saturday's AIA Design Awards, held at the newly opened Nines hotel in the former Meier & Frank building. The Honor Award, as it's called, went to Allied's design for Booker T. Washington high school in Dallas.

As with Allied's legendary Wieden + Kennedy building in Portland as well as its new Museum of Art & Design in New York, this is a rehab of an older building that re-imagines it. The arts-oriented high school (pictured above left), attended by musicians Norah Jones, Roy Hargrove and Erykah Badu (as Tim DuRoche notes on the Burnside Blog), was originally built in 1922. Allied added 170,000 square feet that includes two theaters, science labs, dance studios, and a costume design shop. The form takes a series of floating planes, clad in grayish brick with a random-looking pattern of vertical window strips that makes the facade look a bit like an inside-out barcode. This project was on hold for years; Cloepfil had already completed most of the design when I interviewed him for a profile in 2003. So it's good to see it finished.

Brett Crawford Architecture + Planning won the night's other Honor Award, in addition to a Sustainability Award, for the 1310 Condominiums in Southeast Portland. (My apologies - I initially had Allied's as the only Honor winner.)

The 1310, also featured in the January Portland Spaces issue, is clad with handsome Okume wood panels and an innovative rain-screen system, as well as numerous passive sustainable features from natural ventilation to skylights and tankless hot water heaters.

Although no project by Works Partnership won a built award (none were submitted), the firm was one of only two double winners in the architecture category. (The IIDA also honored interior design in the same ceremony, and Portland firm Corso Staicoff was also a multiple award winner.) The firm won in the Unbuilt category for 300B, a theater and club being developed by Randy Rapaport and Beam Development's Brad Malsin.

In the jury critique session held at the AIA's Center for Architecture on Friday night, the trio of jurors--while not divulging any winners--clearly seemed enamored with this project. Shaped like a black cube, its facade on the top and sides has a series of organic looking fissures cut for windows and skylights. Although it's unclear if this theater will get built, Rapaport in particular seeks a bold, eye-catching design. While in the past working with Holst Architecture, Rapaport is now very much into Works Partnership, as Beam has been for some time.

That same firm also won an Unbuilt award for Grow.PDX (right), a 19-unit housing development proposed for the St. Johns neighborhood near Cathedral Park. In the rendering, Grow.PDX looks a little bit like a 22nd century version of a 1960s public housing project.

Another Merit award went to Mahlum Architects for its latest Providence Health System clinic. Although not known as a high-end design boutique per se, Mahlum has a long history of fine sustainable buildings. At Friday's critique session, the jury made note of this project's "plasticity" and "layers of light" - that it was a modest building with complexity and beauty.

"We looked for decision making in projects," said juror Marlon Blackwell of the University of Arkansas of the awards selection process. "What resources did you have and how did you use them?" To receive an Honor Award, the top prize, a project has to be "resolute at the scale of the city, of the site and street, and of the hand," Blackwell added. "Very often architecture is not a big move so much as a game of inches."

A Craftsmanship Award went to Fletcher Farr Ayotte's design of the University of Oregon's White Stag block, which recently also received LEED Gold certification from the US Green Building Council.

No stranger to the AIA awards, the venerable Thomas Hacker Architects took home a Merit Award for its Humanities Complex at the University of California/Santa Cruz. The firm's Atwater Place condos in South Waterfront were apparently shut out for an award. But look for Hacker's Mercy Corps headquarters and Cyan apartments to compete for awards in the next year or two. Thomas Hacker Architects is also celebrating its 25th anniversary this week.

Another out of town project by a local firm, the WestTown on 8th condos in Eugene by to Vallaster & Corl won a Merit Award as well. The firm, which is among the most venerable condo designers in town, also received a Citation Award (one notch lower than Merit, two lower than Honor) for the Jefferson Condos on SW 18th and Jefferson pictured at right. ("Fish don't fry in the kitchen, beans don't burn on the grill.") I've been a fan of this elegantly curving brick building in Goose Hollow, a throwback to the effortlessly beautiful fabric buildings of Holland, since it was first completed last year.

Some of the most acclaimed and/or biggest firms that have won a lot of design awards in the past, such as Holst Architecture, Skylab or even Zimmer Gunsul Frasca, weren't honored as much this year - although Hotel Modera, which Holst worked on, was honored by the IIDA for its interiors by Corso Staicoff. In the jury critique session on Friday, the jury alluded to not having a full sense of Modera from the photographs; although that apparently didn't bother the separate interior awards jury.

At Friday's critique session, the jury also had some words about Portland - although only (as usual) after a longer period talking about their own work. I'm always slightly frustrated by the crit session for this reason. I like hearing the jurors tell their own stories, but by the time they get to talking about Portland and Portland projects, there are only a few minutes left. And that time got spent talking largely about little practical details of the proposals and how the jury went about their selections.

Talking about Portland, though, they (unsurprisingly perhaps) made note of the city's streetscape and attention to public-facing facades. "We saw some really good facades," juror Ron Radziner of LA's Marmol Radziner & Associates said. The jury also expressed surprise at not seeing more single-family houses or retail designs entered in the competition - although more of those were present in the IIDA awards. The jury speculated that Portland is more civic minded, and perhaps that is why there were more mixed-use projects entered and fewer houses, the latter of which would comprise a lot of most other design award competitions.

Last Friday morning in a crack-of-dawn breakfast ceremony at the Hilton, the BetterBricks Awards honored members of Oregon's design and construction community for their efforts in creating energy-efficient architecture.

BetterBricks, a nonprofit initiative of the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance, is also a sponsor of this website. Hopefully this post will not seem like advertorial-style promotion for BetterBricks. But I deemed the awards a relevant story to report.

The awards were given out in six categories: (1) owner/decision-maker, (2) architecture, (3) engineering, (4) facility management/building operations, (5) advocate and (6) emerging leader. Continuing a trend from past years, honorees came from Gerding/Edlen Development, architecture firm SRG Partnership and mechanical engineer Interface Engineering, as well as a few other sources.

The owner/decision maker award went to Mark Edlen, head of Gerding/Edlen Development. This was probably a no-brainer for the jury, considering that Gerding is not just Portland's most active and large-scale green developer, but one of the nation's.

The architect winner was John Schleuning of SRG Partnership. Schleuning is the 'S' in the firm's acronym, and has guided SRG through decades of very solid design work. I actually associate Kent Duffy as much or more with SRG's most significant projects of recent years than Schleuning, but Duffy's boss is a guiding hand for the whole firm and has an impressive long track record. Duffy has previously won a BetterBricks award anyway. SRG doesn't have as high a profile as other comparable medium-sized firms. They've largely sat out the condo boom of the last several years, for example, instead focusing on public buildings such as libraries and universities. Even so, much of SRG's biggest projects include leading edge green design, such as the Lillis Business Complex at the University of Oregon and an expansion of the Mt. Angel Abbey campus beside Alvar Aalto's masterful library there.

The engineering award was a tie, between John Gray of Interface Engineering and Mike Kaplan of Kaplan Engineering. Again, I'm not sure how BetterBricks chooses what individuals from these firms receive the prizes. When I wrote about Interface's work on the GBD Architects designed, LEED Platinum OHSU Center for Health & Healing, for example, it was Andy Frichtl from that firm leading the charge. But Frichtl is a past winner for Interstate, so I guess they decided to spread it around. Regardless, Interface is a strong force in Portland green building because the mechanical engineering they offer is hugely responsible for an efficient structure: they create the guts of the building that uses energy to heat and cool the structure.

Salem Public Schools' David Furr and Kathleen Hill were the facility management winners, while Renee Loveland of Gerding Edlen Development was recognized as this year's top advocate. Dennis Wilde of Gerding is usually considered their big long-term sustainability advocate, but he's also a past winner. Naomi Cole, sustainability coordinator for Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Partnership, was honored as this year's emerging leader. She must indeed be emerging: I've visited ZGF countless times and have never met Naomi or heard her name. But ZGF does increasingly impressive work with strong sustainability credentials, particularly when working with Gerding Edlen.

Meanwhile, congratulations to all the winners. And as we look ahead, who are some of the developers, architects, engineers and other players deserving of recognition?

The Architectural Foundation of Oregon has announced its annual Honored Citizen. And no, this doesn’t have anything to do with a discounted meal at Shari’s restaurant and pie house. Instead, it’s a kind lifetime achievement award for those who have made a lasting contribution to the built environment, either here in Portland or elsewhere in the state. Past honorees include urban naturalist/advocate Mike Houck, architect Robert Frasca, philanthropist Jean Vollum, and landscape architect Barbara Fealy.

Although he won a Bronze Star in World War II parachuting behind enemy lines with the Army’s famed 82nd Airborne division, locally developer John Gray is best known for resort projects like Sunriver in central Oregon near Bend and Salishan on the coast just south of Lincoln City. Each is a remarkable and lasting demonstration of how Gray patronized talented, noteworthy local architects like Van Evra Bailey and John Storrs, the latter of whom designed Salishan.

In Portland, Gray was also a developer of John’s Landing, named not after himself but the B. P. John Furniture Company, the largest of several furniture manufacturers along the west side of the Willamette. John Storrs’ designs helped Gray and others transform the area into Portland’s first riverside residential and commercial development.

As it happens, I’ve been thinking about John’s Landing lately because I’ve been getting weekly acupuncture treatments on Southeast Macadam. (Remember when they used to call South Waterfront “North Macadam”, by the way?) Although one certainly has to respect and applaud the way John’s Landing was redeveloping relatively central riverfront property decades before it became widespread, I don’t find it a pleasant place to spend time.

It’s unfortunate: This is a major arterial highway, and cities have to have them. Even if there were a streetcar all the way to Lake Oswego and lots of commuters were using it, we’d still need a four-lane road going south from Portland. And because of the hilly terrain, there aren’t that many alternatives. It’s not as if there are other streets on a grid to diffuse the traffic. So I don’t blame drivers in this regard or the need for the highway going through here.

However, this is not a pedestrian friendly place, either in the relationship of the sidewalks to the busy street or the architecture. Some of the houses in John’s Landing are very nice, and so is Willamette Park. But from OPB’s ugly and banal corporate headquarters to the car dealerships to the lowest-common-denominator restaurants (excepting the yummy breakfast spot Café du Berry and a couple others), it’s unfortunate that in pedestrian-friendly Portland that south Macadam doesn’t feel more pleasant to walk or shop at. I don’t mean to say that it’s a hopeless string of strip malls and fast food, but John’s Landing could use a dose of North Mississippi and even the Pearl. Don’t you think?

This is not meant to take anything away from John Gray, either. Quite the contrary. He was a visionary, it seems, and one who patronized some of the best local architects of their time. Particularly if one lived in Oregon during the 1970s or 80s, when there was far lest development on the coast or east of the Cascades, places like Salishan and Sunriver were distinctive places that felt as much like California’s famed Sea Ranch development: modern but born from nature and a sense of place.

And John’s Landing seems capable of taking on new life given how the space between this neighborhood and Portland is filling out (South Waterfront), including perhaps a streetcar to be extended through. What could we do with John’s Landing to compliment the strides that John Gray and his architects made in the last generation? And to whom can this airborne builder pass the baton to?

On Friday night, the AIA/Portland chapter (a sponsor of this site) held its annual design awards gala. Ten awards were given out, seven for built projects and three for unbuilt ones.

The top award you can win from this ceremony is the 'Honor Award', which went to two projects: Zimmer Gunsul Frasca's design for the University of Oregon's Athletic Medicine Center in Eugene and Paul McKean's Neal Creek House near Hood River. The two projects couldn't be more different. One is a palace for premiere Oregon Duck athletes, bankrolled in large part by Nike co-founder Phil Knight and other affluent donors. The other is one architect's little house for himself and his family. One's by the biggest firm in town, the other by a sole practitioner.

Of the Neal Creek House, the jury commented that they were "taken by the way this building sits on the landscape and found it to be an example of elegant and innovative use of space on a very restrictive budget." The project is "humble in its concept, very tight in plan and beautifully executed with a vertical circulation for the meadow up into the house."

The UO project, said the jury, was "extremely well executed with an interesting program. It is spatially rich and complex, which is difficult to do within a purely interior space." Jurors also "appreciated the transparency within the space and how it embraced the athletic history through colors, graphics and unique branding. This clearly was an expensive project, but the money was spent very, very well." And the green-and-yellow color scheme naturally looks better than black and orange. (By the way, would somebody tell Nike that black isn't an Oregon Ducks color? And that football players don't need faux diamond plating to look tough?)

I'm also happy to see ZGF winning a top award because it's another validation of the improved caliber of design that has come out of one of the city's top firms. ZGF has been responsible for many key buildings in Portland as well as the MAX train. Head principal Bob Frasca is at the very least a minor legend. But while these designs are a collaborative affair, the UO project and other recent designs such as the Eliot Tower confirm the talents of a younger generation at ZGF headed by architects like Eugene Sandoval.

Recently a vitriol-spewing curmudgeon named John commented on this site that there is no beautiful contemporary architecture made today. Each of these projects, as well as past AIA award winners such as Rick Potestio's Lair Condominiums, Holst's Belmont Lofts, or Brad Cloepfil's 2281 Glisan building provide more than enough retort.

Aside from the two Honor Award winners, local firm Works Partnership picked up both of the Merit Awards, which are the second-tier of honors (followed by the Citation Awards). Their renovation of the Olympic Mills warehouse in the Central Eastside (pictured) dazzled the jury for its creation of several interior courtyards to introduce natural light as well as its seven-story interior stairwells clad in wood screens. Works Partnership's unbuilt Encased Houses project also won a Merit Award, and its unbuilt mixed-use housing project on NW Upshur won a Citation Award.

Works Partnership, headed by Bill Neburka and Carrie Schilling, is a young firm but has won AIA design awards before. They've also really put their stamp on the Central Eastside more than any other Portland firm with their renovations for Beam Development of the East Bank Commerce Center and its adjacent River Avenue Commerce Center, joined now by the Olympic Mills project, which dwarfs those buildings.

Rising-star architect Jeff Kovel and his firm Skylab walked away with top honors last year for their mixed-use building on 12th Avenue downtown. This year Skylab won both a Citation Award and Sustainability Award for its design of the new Nau apparel store in Bellevue. Look for Skylab to be a major player at next year's awards, either for the cool lounge they're designing atop the renovated Meier & Frank building, or the bold condo tower planned for near the Crystal Ballroom.

The Nau store actually seems somewhat tame for Skylab, but the award is an indication of the largely untapped potential of retail design in the US. If you ever go to Japan, it won't take long to notice that their retail outlets are light years ahead in terms of the theatricality of design. Then again, considering Nau's brand identity is one of woodsy integrity and high performance, the simple palette of wood and concrete is probably appropriate. After all, it works very well for design icon Apple in their retail outlets.

Other award winners: the always solid Hennebery Eddy won the latest of its numerous awards over the years for its Historic Barn at the City of Wilsonville Memorial Park. And Colab, whose portfolio includes an incredible Dubai skyscraper and, locally, the very impressive Brandon House just south of the North Mississippi area, won for its design of Split wine bar in Tualatin (pictured). Also, the Mayor's Award for Design Excellence went to the Community Campus at New Columbia by Dull Olsen Weekes, and the People's Choice Award went to another Dubai project: the massive Al Bateen Wharf Hotel + Residences by Otak.

Two more accolades to report on this week: First, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca has received a 2007 Governor's Arts Award from the Oregon Arts Commission. Here's the blurb from the press release:

"The firm has a long history of to integrating artists into its design teams, not just because a percent for art program mandates it, but also because the ZGF architects truly appreciate what artists bring to their projects. It has worked with the Regional Arts & Culture Council on numerous public art projects and often hired artists without any public art requirement. ZGF has also taken a leadership position with RACC's new Work for Art workplace giving program. ZGF was an early adopter of the program and consistently raises the most money each year out of the dozens of workplaces large and small that participate in Work for Art."

The award seems only peripherally related to design itself, specifically as it relates to art, but as it happens ZGF also seems to be doing good work, brought about by a nice balance of old principals like Bob Frasca with an influx of young designers. However, take the honor as you will; a fellow honoree was Oregon Art Beat, which has the sensibility (in my biased opinion) of a well meaning but out of slightly touch yokel.

Meanwhile, Portland's own Brad Cloepfil has his name on the cover of this month's Metropolis magazine as one of "4 Emerging Stars" (the others being Piero Lissoni, Bernard Khoury and Kieran Timberlake). The title of Andrew Blum's piece is "The Elementalist" and the subheading crows, "Brad Cloepfil's emerging body of work may symbolize a shift away from glib shape-making toward a more timeless and lasting architecture."

I'll bet that is music to Brad's ears. I first interviewed him five years ago for Architecture Week magazine, and I remember in that piece him talking firmly about how postmodernism was "an aberration" in the otherwise continuing history of modern architecture. He very much saw Allied Works as a continuation of what people like Louis Kahn and Mario Botta (for whom Brad worked) were already long since doing. When I profiled him for the NY Times a couple years later, the message was all the more about using a language that is elemental and timeless.

Blum also delves into past/current projects of Allied's like the Seattle Art Museum, the Museum of Arts & Design, and our own Wieden + Kennedy building.

Speaking of W+K, if you get a copy of the magazine, make sure to check out the full-page photo of its interior by Sally Schoolmaster. (I believe Allied used Sally for a few different projects, and I have long thought her work is first-rate.) In my copy, the photo was mistakenly placed after another article, isolated by itself. But it's a gorgeous shot that shows a panoramic view of the building's remilled timbers, angular concrete and natural light.

One of Allied Works' upcoming projects is an office building for Disney. Coincidentally, there was also an article in today's Oregonian about how the Portland office market is heating up. Apparently, a new crop of office building projects from a variety of developers could eventually be in the works. How about an Allied office building in Portland to carry on the tradition of the Standard Plaza and Big Pink?

Not likely, though, of course. These are mostly conservative business people putting these projects together, people thinking real estate and profit margin more than timeless architecture. I'm afraid they probably wouldn't be anywhere near aware enough of architecture to understand the opportunity that exists design-wise; they'll surely go with a service-oriented firm and an on-time, on-budget focus. The best you can hope for is that it'll be sustainable; at least green design the mainstream is starting to get.

The Pacific Northwest College of Art announced it has received a $15 million donation from local philanthropist Hallie Ford, which the school will use mostly to fund a visiting artist program.

The donation dwarfs PNCA's previous high of about $500,000 a few years ago. And while the funds won't be used on architecture per se, the donation speaks to the school's increasing presence in the community. Under the leadership of president Tom Manley, PNCA is striving mightily to form the heart of Portland's art and design scene.

As such, there's plenty of reason to imagine what the future might hold for PNCA in terms of brick and mortar.

One of PNCA's ongoing collaborators and supporters is local star architect Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works, who has conducted master planning for the school. One would think Allied would have an inside track if the school were to design and build new facilities.

At the same time, PNCA has what I think is a very cool building in the Pearl District, a converted warehouse space which Holst Architecture (including then-employee Randy Higgins) designed several years ago. PNCA doesn't own the building, though. It's owned by a member of the Goodman family, the parking magnates. That ought to change. I'd like to think some kind of deal could be worked out where the building is sold to the school at below-market value.

PNCA has also considered moving its campus to elsewhere in Northwest Portland, such as Old Town or the northern Pearl District near the Fremont Bridge. This would be exciting in that it'd give the school a chance to express itself and custom-design its digs, but I think they've got an ideal location now. The question to me is more one of how PNCA could leverage some of the nearby space for expansion down the road. And might we eventually, finally, get a new Allied Works building in Portland out of it?

Either way, I think the Pearl District is much better for having a kind of institutional/artistic ground zero, something to balance out all the condos and to really act as a gathering place for hometown and out-of-town creative minds.

One of my favorite publishers in any genre, but especially among architecture and design books, is Taschen. They bring design, art and nostalgia to the masses in smart, elegant packaging and with eclectic taste ranging from surf photography to ancient architectural theory to Japanese advertising posters. And recently, the publisher has been pressing a series of titles focusing on architecture in individual countries. Previous editions focused on design Meccas like Holland. Now, the US edition is out, and it features one Portland representative: BOORA Architects' designs for the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art's Time-Based Art Festival in 2004 and 2005.

In 2004, it was a temporary 200-seat theater, cabaret stage, bar and cafe, using recycled and other simple materials: scaffolding, pegboard, plastic buckets. In 2005, BOORA produced an event complex (pictured in these official shots supplied by the architect - no amatueur photos here) by creatively using scaffolding and orange plastic temporary fencing and a few lights and plants.That one was particularly impressive visually, comparable to the Maryhill Double project near Maryhill Museum in Washington by Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo of Lead Pencil Studio.

The book is called simply Architecture in the United States, and it features "15 to 20 architects--from the firmly established to the up and coming--with the focus on how they have contributed to the very recent architecture in the chosen nation." About the TBA project, author Philip Jodidio writes, "The involvement of BOORA, including hundreds of hours of free design and execution work, represents an explicit acceptance of the fact that architects cannot content themselves with building 'timeless' structures for wealthy patrons. The temporary and effervescent nature of this initiative might in a sense be closer to performance art than to architecture in the usual sense, but it underlines the ways in which contemporary architecture has evolved."

So how come we get a kind of mini-landmark, a local structure that transcends the usual constraints of budget and formula to become something far more impressive than the sum of its parts, and it's only around for about ten days? I'm mostly joking. I mean, our neighbors in Seattle have more so-called architectural gems or landmarks, but I'd certainly wish for the facade of the Experience Music Project to disappear eventually (although I love Hendrix and the museum).

I would love to see someone take the BOORA/TBA projects and turn them into some kind of recurring presence. Maybe the sight of those orange buckets, scaffolding and plastic mesh fencing could become the physical identity of some art or theater group that stages performances in all kinds of unexpected places by bringing the architecture along as a kit of parts.

One other funny thing about the recent publication of Architecture in the United States is that, as I understand it from reading a recent newspaper report, PICA has decided to go with an existing brick-and-mortar space for its after-hours eat/drink/entertainment venue: the Wonder Ballroom and adjacent Cafe Wonder in Northeast Portland. It's great to see TBA heading to Northeast, and perhaps it's asking too much of BOORA to design these kinds of spaces every year. But it's also a little sad to think of these temporary spaces missing from this year's TBA, because their design and construction was itself the embodiment of time-based art.

Incidentally, one of the other Taschen titles I own is called Modernism Rediscovered and consists of architectural photographs by midcentury legend Julius Schulman. The one photo in that book of a Portland building is of Memorial Colisseum. I must say, though, that it does look good. And some of its bones, in an odd way, remind me a little of the scaffolding of BOORA's 2005 event complex.

The inaugural I. Donald Terner Prize was awarded on January 31 to the 8NW8 affordable housing project designed by SERA Architects and developed by Central City Concern.

The Terner Prize, which comes with a $25,000 award (dinner on CCC, anyone?), recognizes successful and innovative affordable housing projects and their leadership teams. It’s administered by the Center for Community Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank was the keynote speaker at a symposium and luncheon in Washington, DC to honor the winning teams.

“In terms of what it provides its residents—attractive space that nurtures a sense of community—8NW8 is heartening,” said Terner Prize Jurist John King, urban design and architecture reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. “But it’s also a real contribution to the urban streetscape and skyline of a city with markedly high standards. Anyone who passes by the building benefits, whether they someday draw on its services or not.”

8NW8 created 180 units of transitional and permanent affordable housing; 120 SRO units serve residents earning 30% or below the average median income and 60 studio apartments serve residents earning 50% or below. I wrote about this project a couple years ago, and remember talking with Paul Jeffreys and John Echlin there about the building’s durable and innovative construction methods. I also love the curving glass frontage at ground level. There's a nice whimsy to this building, but also a quiet dignity achieved through its solid, earth toned materials.

Congratulations to SERA, general contractor Walsh Construction and Central City Concern.